The Works of Charlotte Smith, Part I

Part I Volume 1 Manon L'Escaut, or The fatal attachment (1786); The Romance of Real Life (1787) Smith's first two publications in prose are adaptations of French texts in which she first explores the plight of women in a world governed by men's appetites and legal restrictions, themes she will return to throughout her career. Volume 2 Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) Charlotte Smith's first original fiction sets the pattern for the abiding concern of her later novels: how women cope with the restricted choices society offers them. By tracing the intersecting plots of three heroines, she constructs a complicated social fabric that at once satirizes high society and suggestively demonstrates how women can empower themselves amid its constraints. The candour with which she treats women's sexuality here becomes a distinguishing characteristic of all her fiction. Volume 3 Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1789) A darker novel than her first, Ethelinde also enlarges the social spheres and landscapes in which Smith sets her characters, moving effortlessly between a gothic abbey in England 's Lake District and the King's Bench Prison in London , between selfish aristocrats and impoverished virtue, between rural content and the lures of colonial exploitation. Volume 4 Celestina (1791) Smith's growing confidence as a novelist allows her to expand even further the scope of her concerns. Emboldened by the spirit of the first year of the French Revolution, she both enlarges the social worlds in which her heroine functions and moves her fiction between England and a France reinvigorated by its revolutionary energies. With strong political sympathies Charlotte Smith daringly uses her novel to engage in contemporary debates over how Britain should react to sweeping social change. Volume 5 Desmond (1792) Even more politically adventurous, Desmond moves back and forth between France and England , and, as an epistolary novel set between 1790 and 1792, openly reconfigures the recent historical record from a radical perspective.