My edition of Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde has been published!

Charlotte Smith (1749-1807) by George Romney (1792)

Sonnet 69 from Elegiac Sonnets

Written at the same place [where refugees land], on seeing a seaman return who had been imprisoned at Rochfort

Clouds, gold and purple, o’er the westering ray
Threw a bright veil, and catching lights between,
Fell on the glancing sail, that we had seen
With soft, but adverse winds, throughout the day
Contending vainly: as the vessel nears,
Encreasing numbers hail it from the shore;
La! on the deck a pallid form appears,
Half wondering to behold himself once more
Approach his home. — And now he can discern
His cottage thatch amid surrounding trees;
Yet, trembling, dreads lest sorrow or disease
Await him there, embittering his return:
But all he loves are safe; with heart elate,
Tho’ poor and plunder’d, he absolves his fate!

Dear friends and readers,

Although I’ve been putting my blogs on historical fiction set in the 18th century, both in film and in novels on this blog (e.g., Poldark and Outlander), and have now and again put teaching 18th century texts (Fielding’s Tom Jones) and enjoyment in reading and viewing arts and music and books of the era, I’ve kept scholarship in the area in my Austen reveries blog. Hence I’ve not posted much at all about Charlotte Smith, a consuming interest (in her life) and love (for her poetry and some of her novels) in my life now for many years (see More First Encounters).

Charlotte Smith was a great and profound poet in the later 18th century, the mother of romanticism (with Wordsworth a father, and Radcliffe, mothering the Gothic), and an absorbing original novelist. I attended the second conference devoted just to her at Chawton House Library in Hampshire this past October, gave a paper on her as a post-colonial writer, and after a five-year effort published the first affordable paperback scholarly edition of her second novel, Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake.

The purpose of this blog is to encourage anyone interested to buy it at Valancourt Press, which will take you to Amazon, and its occasion is a wonderfully thorough and insightful blog by the novelist, literary critic and publisher, Tyler Tichelaar:

Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde: A Missing link between Romanticism and the Gothic, to which I append my comment and then some:

I didn’t sufficiently emphasize in my introduction the book as a romantic novel, though I did talk about the poetic landscape and how (from contemporary reviews and a contemporary almost immediate French translation), it seems what most struck people. We have to remember that Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest was first published in 1790, the same year as Ethelinde, and The Mysteries of Udolpho came four years later. So this novel was a revelation. In the sequence where Ethelinde goes to her father’s tomb, she anticipates and imitates the haunted gothic of Victorian fiction. I probably didn’t think of the romantic connections because it’s a rare novel by Smith where she does not include any of her poems. Maybe because she thought she’d created poetry in words enough with the landscapes. I agree with Robert the book does not feel very Burney-like, Smith is so corrosively angry in her satire on awful characters. But I feel certain all these women read one another. I also forget Smith’s novels became part of the Jacobin novelists of the 1790s too (Rogert Bage’s Hermsprong, Thomas Holcroft, Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman) and Walter Scott wrote a long beautiful perceptive appreciation.

Valancourt has brought the book out as a hardback. I conclude it’s selling well — for a book of this sort. The publisher & editor has indicated to me he’s not really interested in going on to publish another by Smith: his business seems to have begun by concentrating on publishing rarer older gothic and Victorian novels (out of copyright) but in the last few year more contemporary and gay novels have been added to the list. If he should change his mind, I think I’ll ask for a payment this time 🙂

Several Smith novels are available as Broadview Press editions, e.g. Celestina; Kentucky Press, e.g. The Young Philosopher. A couple others are available in good facsimile reprints but no notes and no introduction, no bibliography (e.g., The Banished Man, about war-torn Europe and France from an emigre’s perspective). Montalbert is in one of these reprints of ECO texts where there are four tiny pages per page, but you can buy it cheaply. Even The Romance of Real Life is available in an OCR facsimile.

Marchmont is now the only novel by Smith not available in an affordable edition. It was Marchmont I and the publisher spoke as an alternative to Ethelinde when we first discussed the project, and I probably chose Ethelinde because it’s historically more important (see above — it was a revelation), and I’d read part of Ethelinde. And yet Marchmont is a powerful book — it has this extraordinarily frank depiction of a debtor’s prison (anticipates Dickens) and makes use of a terrible siege in France, Toulon, and so calls attention to the reality that the “terror” of and many of the early directorate’s actions were a reaction against invasion from other capitalist-royalist national leaderships with their armies and the complicated politics within France. Trollope’s La Vendee is about the counter-revolutionaries in the countryside.

Fragment Descriptive of the Miseries of War

To a wild mountain, whose bare summit hides
Its broken eminence in clouds; whose steeps
Are dark with woods; where the receding rocks
Are worn with torrents of dissolving snow;
A Wretched woman, pale and breathless, flies,
And, gazing round her, listens to the sound
Of hostile footsteps:–No! they die away–
Nor noise remains, but of the cataract,
Or surly breeze of night, that mutters low
Among the thickets, where she trembling seeks
A temporary shelter–clasping close
To her quick-throbbing heart her sleeping child . . . (1797)
from Smith’s The Emigrants

Smith deserves to given her rightful place in the literature of the era and be read for pleasure by more modern readers than the usual academic specialists at long last. I’m so glad Valancourt made an appealing compact edition.

Ellen