SOURCE: Rogers, Katharine M. “Romantic Aspirations, Restricted Possibilities: The Novels of Charlotte Smith.” In Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, edited by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, pp. 72-88. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Rogers explores Smith's limitations as a female writer incorporating the ideals of Romanticism in her novels.]

Charlotte Smith wrote her novels in the 1790s (from Emmeline in 1788 through The Young Philosopher in 1798), at the time when Romanticism was just beginning to vitalize English literature. She shared the Romantics' intense relationship with nature and was drawn to their ideals of political and sexual freedom. But she could not pursue these ideals as freely as her younger contemporaries Blake and Wordsworth, partly because the novel is more restricted than poetry by actual circumstance, more because, as a woman writing about women, she could not claim the boundless power of the Romantic imagination.

Even though the novel was in some ways unreceptive to Romanticism, however, its development in the later eighteenth century into feminized sentimental and Gothic forms both prepared the way for and shared characteristics with the new movement. Some of what might be considered Romantic features of Smith's work came from the tradition in which she was writing. From mid-century, these novels had affirmed the value of subjectivity by focusing on the consciousness of their protagonists and consequently setting feeling above institution and law. Sensitivity became an essential attribute of superior people, and it alienated them from the obtuse society around them; sentimental novels typically display sensitive characters suffering in a crass world. This suffering was best displayed in young women, socially powerless and therefore dominated and exploited by unworthy established authorities. From the contemporary Gothic tradition, Smith took exotic adventures, which she used in a mechanical way, and wild natural settings, which she developed to better effect than any of her contemporary novelists.

All her sensitive characters share her own intense responsiveness to nature, which she explicitly identifies as romantic. Mrs. Stafford and Emmeline are “romantic wanderers” because they like to take walks through an unspoiled forest, and vulgar Mrs. Ashwood sneers at Emmeline's “pretty romantic notion of contemplation by moonlight” (Emmeline 147, 202). Mrs. Glenmorris looks forward to “wild romantic solitude” in northern Scotland (Young Philosopher 2: 77), as does Celestina, whose worldly suitor tries to keep her near him by deriding her plan as “wild, romantic, unpleasant” (2: 236). Enthusiasm for wild scenery and use of natural description to heighten the emotional effect are equally prominent in the novels of Ann Radcliffe (published 1789-97), but Smith's backgrounds are more authentic and more sensitively adapted to her characters' moods.¹ In Radcliffe, natural scenery functions as a self-consciously picturesque backdrop, invariably sublime and intended to elicit generalized religious awe; and it signifies the finer sensibility of those characters who can respond to Nature's grandeur. In Smith at her best, it seems to flow from and amplify the emotions of characters in a particular situation.

Typically, her natural descriptions are called forth by her characters' state of mind. Temporarily cheered by the hope of meeting Marchmont's family, Althea can appreciate the signs of early spring in the desolate manor house she has been banished to: “the faint tinge of fresh green” in the ruined garden, some red buds on the long-neglected fruit trees, a few surviving crocuses (2: 90-94). Celestina goes off by herself to contemplate a sublime sunset in the Hebrides:

The sun was already declining in an almost cloudless sky, and gave the warmest splendour to the broad expanse of ocean, broken by several islands, whose rocky points and angular cliffs caught the strong lights, in brilliant contrast to the lucid hue of the heath with which their summits were cloathed, and which on the northern and eastern sides threw a dark shadow on the clear and tranquil bosom of the sea. The sea birds, in swarming myriads, were returning to their nests among the ragged precipices beneath her.

(3: 28)

She thinks how Willoughby would share her delight and how, with him, she could enjoy spending her life even in so desolate a setting. When her hopes of marrying Willoughby wane, with the waning year, she finds a bleaker solace in Nature.

The sun, far distant from this northern region, was as faint and languid as the sick thoughts of Celestina: his feeble rays no longer gave any warm colouring to the rugged cliffs that rose above her head, or lent the undulating sea that sparkling brilliance which a few weeks before had given gaiety and cheerfulness even to these scattered masses of almost naked stone, against which the water incessantly broke. Grey, sullen, and cold, the waves now slowly rolled towards the shore, where Celestina frequently sat whole hours, as if to count them, when she had in reality no idea present to her but Willoughby lost to her for ever.

(3: 40)

Geraldine, traveling through a war-torn area of France to meet her unspeakable husband, describes “one of those cold, damp, gloomy mornings, which impresses a dreary idea that the sun has forsaken the world.—The wind sighed hollow among the half stripped trees; and the leaves slowly fell from the boughs, heavy with rain—The road, rough, and hardly passable, seemed leading us to the dark abode of desolation and despair” (Desmond 3: 289). The long opening sequence of The Banished Man makes even more effective use of natural conditions. Smith's characters are fleeing by night from their castle, which will soon be overrun by the French Revolutionary army; they cannot see their enemies or know their future. The whole scene is drenched with water—torrential rain that makes it impossible to see, marshy ground that they cannot depend on, and a river that they must cross without knowing where the ford is. The amorphous watery confusion both heightens their anxiety and symbolizes the uncertainty of their fate.

Smith and her characters turned to Nature in the manner of the major Romantic poets, to respond to their emotional needs and help them to articulate their feelings. But there is a significant difference: they could not count on finding consolation there. Wordsworth knew that “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her” (Tintern Abbey ll. 122-23); Byron's Childe Harold found an unfailing “pleasure in the pathless woods” and solaced his troubles by mingling “with the Universe” (Canto 4, stanza 178). But Smith's repeated conclusion, in her own person and through her characters, is that Nature cannot cure human misery. Leaving her castle, Emmeline is offered a set piece of sublime landscape—a rushing mountain stream a ruined monastery and a castle “still frowning in gothic magnificence,” a rugged seashore, and a rich autumnal valley set off by “blue and barren hills.” But, despite being “ever alive to the beauties of nature,” all Emmeline feels is that she is leaving the only home she has ever known (37).

We can approach a definition of Smith's Romanticism by contrasting her with Ann Radcliffe, who wrote at the same time and in the same genre, but who was (despite Byron's admiration) much more conservative. As Smith's use of natural description was more innovative, so her interpretation of the conventions of the sentimental novel approached far closer to Romantic radicalism. Both women created sensitive heroines who recoil from crudity and resist attempts to coerce them into loveless marriages, but who also consistently exert rational control over their impulses. Radcliffe, however, lays more emphasis on control; well-conducted Emily in her Mysteries of Udolpho is constantly exhorted to control her sensibility. Smith's heroines, on the other hand, sometimes luxuriate in theirs. In her first letter, which opens Volume 2 of Desmond, Geraldine Verney presents herself as a unique sufferer: “Is it, that I set out in life with too great a share of sensibility? or is my lot to be particularly wretched?” (2: 1). Without any troubles like Geraldine's to justify her conclusion, Rosalie at eighteen had “already … acquired that painful experience that had made her fear she should taste of unalloyed happiness no more” (Montalbert, 1795, 1: 25).²

Sensitivity leads Smith's characters to the alienation from a crass society that marked Romantic heroes. Inability to fit in, a comic or blameworthy trait in Fielding's or Smollett's novels, becomes a distinction in Romantic literature. Although none of her characters are self-conscious rebels and outcasts like Cain or Prometheus, they do not fit smoothly into the established social order, any more than she herself did.³ Alone in the woods on a still November evening, Orlando contrasts Nature's quietude with man's anxious activity, runs through the various careers open to a young man, and concludes that all are pointless, if not pernicious (160-61). Rosalie, the heroine of Montalbert, who is supposed to be the daughter of the local vicar, feels alien from him and his family, who, though presentable enough, are commonplace. She goes off whenever she can to read or draw by herself, for she has long been “conscious, that such sort of people as she was usually thrown among, people who only escape from dullness by flying to defamation, were extremely tiresome to her, though she saw that nobody else thought so, and suspected herself of being fastidious and perverse” (2: 137). Her timid self-doubt is not justified, of course; the Romantic heroine really is superior to the commonplace, conventional people around her.

Smith's heroines (after her first, Emmeline) are also distinguished from Radcliffe's by being more ready to commit themselves to love than was strictly compatible with contemporary standards of feminine prudence and propriety. In The Old Manor House, timid, inexperienced Monimia declares, without having consulted any older authority: “I do not know, Orlando, why I should be ashamed to say that I love you better than any body else in the world; for indeed who is there in it that I have to love? If you were gone, it would be all a desert to me” (43). Shortly after meeting Montalbert, Rosalie engages herself to him without any thought of consulting her parents, even though he is a Roman Catholic and her supposed father is a Church of England clergyman. She then agrees to a clandestine marriage by a priest for fear of losing Montalbert; Smith censures her lightly, but does not punish her with remorse as was customary at the time. Althea feels a strong interest in Marchmont shortly after meeting him and before he has made any declaration to her; this soon develops into an “extreme concern” that instigates her to help him even though she knows the world would disapprove (Montalbert 2: 148); and she accepts his declaration of love while knowing that there is no hope of marriage or of her family's consent.⁴

Smith often calls her characters “romantic,” almost always to show their superiority to commonplace people. The word was used throughout the eighteenth century to mean reaching beyond the bounds of reason and common sense, but in the earlier period it generally suggested fatuous wishful thinking or quixotism. Smith, however, typically applies it to idealistic characters whose principles rise above expediency and whose aims rise above mercenary prudence. FitzEdward, a hardened young rake in Emmeline, dismisses Delamere's intention of marrying a penniless girl of uncertain birth, rather than seducing and abandoning her, as “a boyish and romantic plan” (Emmeline 52). When Rosalie refuses to marry a crass but rich young clergyman, her supposed father accuses her of “affecting … fine romantic airs.” Her supposed mother exhorts her “to follow, like a reasonable woman, the advice of those who know better what is fit for you than you do yourself” and ridicules the idea of women's marrying “just according to their own romantic whims” (Montalbert 1: 57, 61, 74-75).

The most Romantic lover in Smith's novels is Desmond, who adores the unhappily married Geraldine Verney. He is aware that a love that finds total satisfaction in serving a woman and contemplating her virtue from a distance would be considered “romantic, and even ridiculous” by ordinary people (Desmond 2: 241). His hard-headed friend Bethel doubts that an erotic passion can be at once intensely pure and intensely ardent and warns against cultivating one that cannot be lawfully fulfilled.⁵ Bethel advises Desmond to distract himself from a passion that can only serve to render him miserable by finding some other woman worthy of his love or, if he has “become, through the influence of this romantic attachment, too fastidious for reasonable happiness,” to go abroad and seek relief in a change of scene or a pleasant liaison (1: 188-89).

Even after he seems to have lost Geraldine forever, Desmond insists on the superior value of his love: it “may be very true, and very reasonable” that, “if I could once determine to look out for some other enjoyments than those my romantic fancy had described, I might yet find as reasonable a portion of happiness as any human being has a right to expect”—but he cannot, because he has envisioned a higher degree of felicity: “I know there are a hundred, nay, a thousand other plans and people, with whom other men might sit down contented; but I have made up a ‘fair idea,’ and losing that, all is to me a blank.” He goes on to marvel that a man of Bethel's fine mind, who knows Geraldine, “cannot comprehend the delight of living only for one beloved object, though hopeless of any other return than what the purest friendship may authorise” (3: 214-16). Smith presents her hero and develops her plot to indicate that Desmond's “unreasonable” attitude, his refusal to settle for what is attainable, is to be accepted as admirable. Desmond's total commitment to his passion and Smith's insistence that it is not quixotic and morally questionable, but, rather, idealistic beyond the reach or even the conception of ordinary people, makes him a Romantic hero, even if not so forceful and exciting a one as Manfred or Heathcliff.⁶

The sentimental novelists consistently affirmed that women should not be forced to violate their feelings in choosing a husband, but they agreed that, once married, a virtuous woman had to repress her feelings as necessary to fulfill her conjugal duty. The sacred institution of marriage took precedence over personal feelings, except for extreme radicals and Romantics. Although Smith never explicitly asserted that it was unjust to keep people bound forever to an unequal bargain or that love should take precedence over legal bonds, she filled her novels with deserving people (of both sexes) permanently chained in marriage to odious spouses. In her time, it was shocking even to hint that some marriages should be dissolved; only Mary Wollstonecraft was bold enough to declare, in The Wrongs of Woman, that a woman whose marriage had been destroyed by a vicious husband had the right to find emotional and sexual fulfillment with another man.

Smith did shock her contemporaries by her presentation of Lady Adelina Trelawny in Emmeline. Adelina, overpersuaded in early youth to marry a man who abuses and deserts her, yields to a congenial lover and becomes pregnant. Overwhelmed by guilt and fear of the brothers she has supposedly dishonored, she retreats into seclusion, suffers from critical illness and insanity, and longs for death until her child gives her the will to live. All the while, however, she has the unhesitating sympathy and support of the virtuous heroine; and in the end there is a hope that she will marry her lover.⁷ This was a liberal position in a world where moralists like Hannah More defined Christian forgiveness of an adulteress as isolating her from society to spend the remainder of her life meditating on her sin (Strictures 1: 47-49). Even Mary Wollstonecraft (in her prudish youth) condemned Smith for making Adelina too attractive and romantic and insufficiently reformed (Analytical Review 27). Without explicitly justifying Adelina's sin, Smith's detailed account inevitably suggests the absurd injustice of giving it overwhelming importance, imposing the responsibility for an entire family's honor on a desperate young woman, expecting anyone not to prefer a loving, attentive man to one who broadcasts his total disregard for her.

Although Smith does criticize women who yield to unlicensed love, she often endows them with good qualities that completely overshadow their failure in chastity. Emily Cathcart in Celestina, seduced as a girl and now a kept mistress, is noted for her generosity rather than her unchastity, as she supports her destitute sister and strives on her deathbed for the moral salvation of her lover; she is “amiable, unhappy” (4: 80), rather than sinful. Mrs. Vyvian, Rosalie's real mother, is treated with total sympathy even though she gave birth to an illegitimate child: we hear only of her beautiful character and her sufferings at the hands of the hard-hearted husband she was bullied into marrying to cover her supposed disgrace. The fact that Mrs. Vyvian sees her own situation in that of Rosalie, who has been imprudent although not seduced, suggests a more daring sexual message than Smith is prepared to make explicit—that is, that a heroine might violate the law of chastity and still attain a happy ending; in short, that unchastity need not be punished by lifelong remorse and domestic oppression.⁸

In Desmond, Smith daringly placed an adulterous passion at the center of her plot. The novel is set in the early stage of the French Revolution, and Smith draws a pointed parallel between despotism in the nation and in the home. The French have thrown off the oppression of king, aristocracy, and church, but Geraldine Verney remains the slave of her worthless husband.⁹ When she must obey his order to follow him into war-torn France, she consoles herself with the thought that even “the wildest collection of those people, whose ferocity arises not from their present liberty, but their recent bondage,” will not “injure me, who am myself a miserable slave, returning with trembling and reluctant steps, to put on the most dreadful of all fetters[.]—Fetters that would even destroy the freedom of my mind” (3: 71). Unfortunately, Geraldine's insight into her oppression does not liberate her—or Smith—sufficiently to nerve her to resist it. Smith goes no further than to hint that there is something unhealthy and mechanical in Geraldine's rigid obedience, motivated by duty and not at all by love, and presumably fueled by guilt for not loving and a masochistic satisfaction in behaving correctly with no reward in view (3: 72, 271).

Yet the circumstances Smith presents cannot fail to lead to a questioning of English marriage law. How can any law make Verney's atrocious exploitation of Geraldine morally right, or require her to be loyal and loving to a man who insults her even as he exorbitantly demands her services? How can the tie that binds Geraldine to Verney be more sacred than Desmond's idealistic devotion? If the representation “of a man capable of … a passion so generous and disinterested as to seek only the good of its object” is the height of morality, as Smith claims in her Preface (ii), marital fidelity is clearly a lesser value. Smith further qualifies Geraldine's orthodox saintliness by supplying two sympathetic female characters who are not so rarified. Madame de Boisbelle, also married to a worthless husband, is allowed to have an affair with impunity; and Fanny Waverly, Geraldine's sister, freely condemns their selfish, stupid mother and her attempts to keep ideas out of her daughters' minds. In her lenient treatment of sexually transgressing women, in her repeated representation of extramarital relationships that are more loving and responsible than the corresponding marriages, Smith implies, in true Romantic fashion, that love is more sacred than law.

Although Smith never explicitly condemns the excessive power that a husband held in marriage, she reiterates the injustice of primogeniture, an almost equally sacrosanct part of the family property system. All of her female and most of her male protagonists are dispossessed in favor of less worthy brothers. Typically, the men are younger brothers whose selfish, irresponsible older brothers squander the inheritance that by rights belongs to the whole family (Orlando in The Old Manor House, D'Alonville and Ellesmere in The Banished Man, Montalbert, George Delmont in The Young Philosopher). Sisters, of course, are routinely sacrificed to the interest of their brothers, a point Smith hammers home in Desmond.

Smith's enthusiastic faith that the French Revolution promised universal liberation, personal and sexual as well as political, was shared by all the Romantics. Robert Southey, for example, reminisced that the Revolution had seemed to open up “a visionary world”: “Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race” (Abrams, Norton Anthology, 5th ed. 2: 14). In its early, idealistic stage, the Revolution seemed to verify the Romantics' hopes for limitless human improvement in a new society cleansed of the old corruptions.

It was daring for a woman, who was not supposed even to express opinions on public affairs, to defend the French Revolution; and Smith went so far as to make her hero attack the great Edmund Burke's “elaborate treatise in favor of despotism,” Reflections on the Revolution in France (2: 62; cf. 3: 209). The action of Desmond runs from June 1790 to February 1792: that is, after the abolition of the special privileges of the church and the aristocracy but before the September Massacres, the trial of the King and Queen, and the Reign of Terror. Smith filled her book with political discussions, in every one of which an enlightened, virtuous character defends the Revolution against opponents who are either unthinking or self-interested and corrupt. The Revolution did more than simply reform abuses in France: in showing what the people could accomplish, it brought light to the world. Desmond declares that its success “involves the freedom, and, of course, the happiness, not merely of this great people, but of the universe” (1: 106-7). English “soi-disant great men who love power” had better recognize that “the hour is very rapidly approaching, when usurped power will be tolerated no longer” (1: 178).

Desmond's intelligent but cynical friend Bethel counters his enthusiasm with the traditional eighteenth-century view that it is not so easy to reform human nature. Bethel has not yet noticed any success produced by the new modes of government in France, his personal experience indicates that politicians are inevitably selfish and insincere, and he has not seen enough steadiness and virtue among the Revolutionary leaders to be confident that their admirable principles will be put into practice (1: 197-98). But this reasoning does not puncture Desmond's Romantic optimism; instead, he convinces Bethel that the Revolution is a “great and noble effort for the universal rights of the human race.” However, as he sees hostile reactionary forces arising in all the surrounding nations, Bethel cannot agree with Desmond's optimistic hope “that uncemented by blood, the noble and simply majestic temple of liberty will arise on the site of the barbarous structure of gothic despotism” (2: 52-53).

Writing The Banished Man after the atrocities of the Revolution had begun, Smith still did not abandon her faith in its ideals (Preface, 1: x). But by the time she wrote her last novel, she had given up hope for a reformed society in Europe, agreeing with Bethel “that liberty having been driven away to the new world, will establish there her glorious empire” (Desmond 2: 55). In The Young Philosopher, Glenmorris confirms this glowing vision. He had settled in America after arriving there by accident in the middle of the Revolutionary War and admiring the Americans' determination to be free.¹⁰ After returning to England and being overwhelmed by troubles, he cannot wait to bring his family back to America, where nature and cultivation are happily combined, without the corruption, the false values, the mental restrictions, and the exploitation that have marked all previous civilized societies:

To cultivate the earth of another continent, to carry the arts of civil life, without its misery and its vices, to the wild regions of the globe, had in it a degree of sublimity, which, in Glenmorris's opinion, sunk the petty politics and false views so eagerly pursued in Europe, into something more despicable than childish imbecility. … When he reflected on the degradation to which those must submit, who would make what is called a figure in this country; that they must sacrifice their independence, their time, their taste, their liberty, to etiquette, to forms and falsehoods, which would to him be insupportable, he rejoiced that he had made his election where human life was in progressive improvement.

(4: 201-2)

In America Glenmorris will not have to “see a frightful contrast between luxury and wretchedness … daily witness injustice I cannot repress, and misery I cannot relieve.” There he can study “the great book of nature” instead of corrupt European society, “where all greatness of character seems lost” and where it is impossible “to study human nature unadulterated by inhuman prejudices” (4: 391-92). It is a grand Romantic vision of human society as it ought to be, and, at the end of the book, Delmont and the Glenmorrises go to America, the only place where free, enlightened characters can be at home.

However, George Delmont, the Young Philosopher, is an idealist who has managed to remain uncorrupted by English society. Educated by an enlightened mother according to the principles of Rousseau's Emile, he has been brought up to form his own opinions, “which he never was flogged out of … at Eton” (1: 34). Even as a child, he was an individualist who often wandered off by himself, “threw himself down under a tree with some favourite book, then fell into a reverie as he listened to the wind among the branches, or the dashing of the water against the banks, where, among the reeds and willows crowding over the Thames,” he avoided both the crude mirth of his schoolfellows and the mechanical pedantry of his lessons (1: 49-51). As he generously relieved needy people, he not only glowed with indignation against those who had oppressed them, but looked beyond the individuals to the systems that made the oppression possible. “From detestation against individuals, such as justices and overseers,” this remarkably penetrating young analyst “began to reflect on the laws that put it in their power thus to drive forth to nakedness and famine the wretched beings they were empowered to protect; and he was led to enquire if the complicated misery he every day saw … could be the fruits of the very best laws that could be framed in a state of society said to be the most perfect among what are called the civilized nations of the world” (1: 54). In earlier books Smith had occasionally related corrupt lawyers to the corrupt institutions that nourished them; here she has moved to a full-scale radical attack on the legal system itself.¹¹

“Early taught to have on every point an opinion of his own,” Delmont considered his career options and “determined to yield his freedom to none of those motives which the love of power or of wealth might hold out to him, but to live on his little farm unfettered by the rules he must submit to if he entered into any profession.” Aware that this decision will bring ridicule and blame on him, Delmont nevertheless thinks it more valuable to be a farmer than a judge “condemning wretches legally to die on the gallows,” or a bishop sitting in Parliament and voting for war, or a general presiding “at these human sacrifices,” where men destroy each other without even daring to ask why (1: 92-94). When Orlando reached the same conclusion in The Old Manor House, it might be attributed to old-fashioned sentimental retirement from the world; but here it is definitely Romantic defiance of convention.

In contrast to the conventional moralists of his time, who preached that woman's supposedly natural inclination to comply with those around her was an amiable feature of her character, Delmont wishes that his sweet and compliant sister were less pliable, fearing “that her character would not be formed on reason and conviction, but on the sentiments and conduct of those among whom she might be thrown” (1: 95). He deliberately chooses his own company. Having long discovered that associating with his neighbors “was a very great waste of his time, as well as a needless trial of his civility,” as soon as he was grown up and his own master, he decided to “recover the portion of his days thus unnecessarily given to persons whom he could not discover were at all the better, while he felt himself a great deal worse.” He realized that this decision would make him enemies, but as he had no ambition “to be chairman at a quarter session, or foreman of a grand jury, … he quietly submitted to invidious remarks he did not hear.” However, though he had freed himself from the constraints of meaningless forms of politeness, he did not impose his exacting standards on his sisters; for he made “it the rule of his life, as well in trivial as on material occasions, never to trench upon the liberty of others, while he guarded against being cheated out of his own” (1: 119-21).

Medora, the heroine of The Young Philosopher, is a less satisfactory example of natural reason and rectitude. She is presented as “entirely the child of nature,” and she is a more plausible example than such highly socialized children of nature as Frances Burney's Evelina and Camilla. Medora has “not one idea … that she blushes to avow,” not because she is too “innocent” to have any desires, but because she is free of prudery and unaware of sexual competitiveness. She will later, we are assured, develop a mind and character like that of her enlightened mother, Mrs. Glenmorris (1: 244-45). But Medora fails to display any mental or moral quality that would distinguish her from her contemporary heroines. All Smith's heroines show this discrepancy between aim and achievement. She recognized this problem herself, complaining in Marchmont that she had to conform to conventions that dictated that heroines must be very young, and that very young women must not distinguish themselves by independence of mind or freely expressed passion; indeed, any strongly marked qualities were considered out of place in a young woman (1: 177-79). Smith was also unable to create a fable that would make real the Romantic attitudes and qualities of her characters, resorting instead to tired Gothic devices: Medora is abducted, and Mrs. Glenmorris goes insane from her anxiety at Medora's disappearance.

Mrs. Glenmorris does, however, voice Smith's most eloquent expression of Romantic values. Most people, she says, condemn as “wildly romantic” anyone who “ventures to feel or to express themselves out of the style of common and every day life. But why is it romantic?” She would not like to see Medora let her imagination outrun her reason and make herself “either useless or ridiculous” by bewildering “herself among ideal beings”:

but if affection for merit, if admiration of talents, if the attachments of friendship are romantic; if it be romantic to dare to have an opinion of one's own, and not to follow one formal tract, wrong or right, pleasant or irksome, because our grandmothers and aunts have followed it before; if not to be romantic one must go through the world with prudery, carefully settling our blinkers at every step, as a cautious coachman hoodwinks his horses heads; if a woman, because she is a woman, must resign all pretensions to being a reasoning being, and dares neither look to the right nor to the left, oh! may my Medora still be the child of nature and simplicity, still venture to express all she feels, even at the risk of being called a strange romantic girl.

(2: 13-15)

This is a vision of the emotional freedom, intellectual independence, and openness to new ideas that the Romantics insisted was the natural birthright of every human being. We might wish for more bold and full portrayals, but Smith does show young women protesting against mental limitations (Fanny Waverly), celebrating gains in human liberty (Geraldine Verney), and feeling sexual love outside the bonds of strict propriety (most of her heroines). Neither Smith nor anyone else before Charlotte and Emily Brontë created fully realized Romantic female characters.

Mrs. Glenmorris is protesting against the limitations imposed by a narrow conception of reason that equated it with prudence and a common sense acceptance of things as they are. Thus circumscribed, reason directs us to accept the status quo as the only possible reality, to resist any change as risky, and to dismiss hopes for radical improvement as fanciful. Romantic imagination, as its opposite, liberates the mind to conceive of something better than what presently exists, to dare to strive for and possibly achieve radical improvement.¹² Smith's younger contemporary Jane Austen, who had made fun of romantic excesses in her youth, came to see the value of romance, by which she meant much what Mrs. Glenmorris did. Anne Elliot “had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older” (Persuasion Ch. 4). That is, Anne learned to trust her own feelings and judgment, to venture beyond common sense and prudence, to try for what might be better rather than to settle for what she already knew. Smith's and Austen's claims for the Romantic imagination are comparatively modest, but they point toward the human longing for something better than the life that is reasonable for us to expect—a longing that Emily Brontë was to express with consummate beauty fifty years later: for a world “where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness” (Wuthering Heights Ch. 16).

Yet, of course, Smith was not a fully committed Romantic: she did not find transcendence in Nature, she insisted that passions must be curbed, and she did not believe that imagination led to a more real world than sense. If the Romantic imagination was sublime and spellbinding, it was also self-assured to the point of arrogance. Wordsworth's imagination displaces the evidence of his senses to reveal an invisible world of infinite potentiality that is the proper home of humanity (The Prelude 6: 593-609). Blake asserts even more decisively that his imagination creates a world more real than the one around us. Women, socialized to be receptive, compliant, and conventional, could not develop such confidence in their individual judgment. As a woman, Smith could not make the enormous claims of men possessed by the Romantic imagination. She had to work within the social world she knew, with characters bound by mundane circumstance. She questioned conventional thinking and established institutions, but she could not cast them aside altogether.

Smith's form further tied her to the actual life around her, since the novel requires a strong emphasis on things as they are. As Robert Kiely points out, a romantic novel is something of a contradiction in terms, a battleground on which the claims of imagination and the self collide with those of “reason and the public welfare” (25). The battle rages in Smith's novels, where she claims to aim at probability more than at “the wonderful and extraordinary” (Preface to The Banished Man 1: x), but has one heroine imprisoned in a tower and two others abducted. She constantly calls up romance in her novels in order to deflate or discredit it, as when ridiculous Clarinthia purposely falls in love so as to be sure of “opposition from her family, and … such imaginary miseries as might establish her in her own opinion the ‘heroine of a tale of sympathy’” (Ethelinde 5: 85). But for five volumes Smith puts Ethelinde herself, the exemplary heroine, through very similar “imaginary miseries.”

Often, however, Smith effectively juxtaposed romance and realism in order to bring out the contrast between idealistic aspirations and the limitations of actual life. In The Old Manor House, Romantic elements emphasize the disparity between the unworldly, unselfish hero and heroine and the sordid world they must live in. Romantically named Orlando (who, however, was named after his ancestor to curry favor with the ancient cousin who controls the family property) wants to marry Monimia because she is lovely and he loves her, regardless of her social inferiority and their lack of money. Their love is all-important to them, but the financial constrictions that prevent their marriage are worked out in grinding detail. Monimia is a princess locked away in a tower of the old manor house, and her knight Orlando climbs up to her by a concealed staircase; but both exist in the prosaic context of mean-minded, absurdly self-important Mrs. Rayland and the servants who flatter and outsmart her. “Sanguine and romantic” Orlando loves to contemplate “visionary prospects” (138); but for most of the book he is constrained by petty authorities and irksome circumstances.

As a woman novelist focusing on women, Smith was further limited by the conventions of feminine propriety. Romantic abandon was out of the question for heroines if they were not to forfeit readers' sympathy. Moreover, letting her heroines abandon themselves to passion would mean giving up the claim to rationality that feminists had worked so hard to establish throughout the eighteenth century. Nor would it have been realistic to show women liberated as men could be. The Young Philosopher has been educated to think for himself and acts according to his own views of morality. His sisters neither feel his need for independence, since they have never been encouraged to develop their own ideas, nor would be able to defy convention if they did feel it. They have to listen to their unpleasant great-aunt and sit with boring company, while George blithely goes off to his friends. He claims the right to escape social intercourse that would be disagreeable to himself and not useful to anyone else (1: 257); they have no such option.

Like Radcliffe, who was also concerned with female dignity, Smith never abandoned rational standards of conduct. Byronic heroes who reject all convention and social obligation to pursue their grand, resistless passions may be attractive or, in Smith, sympathetic; but they must be reprehended. Delamere, the original hero of Emmeline, makes no attempt to restrain his passions and repeatedly distresses the heroine by heedlessly pursuing her; he forces Emmeline to lock herself in her room to escape his temper tantrums and grandly dismisses her fears of scandalmongers, refusing to see that a young woman's reputation was more vulnerable than a male aristocrat's. Emmeline, in contrast, invariably maintains rational control and judiciously weighs possibilities. Even when she feels most warmly toward him, she is not subject to “that violent love, which carrying every thing before it, leaves the mind no longer at liberty to see any fault in the beloved object, or any impropriety in whatever can secure it's [sic] success, and which, scorning future consequences, risks every thing for it's present indulgence” (149). In the end, he gets himself killed in an unnecessary duel, and she is provided with a suitably self-disciplined young man. Clinging Montague Thorold and overbearing Vavasour, the unwanted suitors who harass Celestina, are closer to the conventional romantic lover than Willoughby, the hero, who seriously considers a prudential marriage for the sake of his family. Smith's ideal heroes show their love by thoughtfulness and consideration, not, like Thorold, by flamboyant offers to die for their beloved. Even Desmond demonstrates infinite consideration more than fiery passion. He is the most Romantic of Smith's major characters, yet, far from pursuing his emotional needs at all costs, he constantly restricts his actions so as to avoid embarrassing or distressing Geraldine.

None of Smith's approved characters recklessly follow their impulses. Orlando is deeply in love with Monimia and dreads a long separation from her, but when Warwick, about to elope with Isabella, tempts Orlando to elope with Monimia at the same time, he resists out of consideration for his parents (Old Manor House 333-35). After he has married her, he learns that poverty is miserable even if one shares it with a dearly loved wife: “the romantic theory, of sacrificing every consideration to love, produced, in the practice, only the painful consciousness of having injured its object” (517).

Smith's moral ideal is the person who quietly fulfills his or her obligations. Her admirable characters are mindful of the claims of reason and family responsibilities, although most of them commit themselves to an unalterable romantic attachment. Even George Delmont, the Young Philosopher, embarrasses himself to pay his brother's gambling debts. This insistence on consideration for and responsibility to one's family came from Smith's life circumstances more than convention. As a mature woman with an inadequate husband and a family of children to bring up, she was painfully aware that stable family life was more important than romantic raptures. Perpetually weighed down by family cares, she could not escape to or even maintain faith in an ideal world. In an amusing sequence in The Banished Man, her alter ego, Mrs. Denzil, complains that she must devise a tender dialogue between two idealized lovers while worrying about bills and struggling to meet her publisher's deadline in order to pay them, meanwhile fretting about the destruction of her garden by the neighbor's pigs (2: 225-28). In such a setting, a woman could not see herself as a prophet in the manner of Blake and Wordsworth. As a hard-working professional whose works had to meet the bills, she was tied to this world. Romanticism enhanced Charlotte Smith's response to natural beauty, strengthened her feminism, enlarged her interests; but it could not provide her, or most women, with a consistent world view.

Notes

1. There is one embarrassing exception when, in The Old Manor House, Smith made injudicious use of a secondary source and placed the St. Lawrence River in a subtropical landscape. It is also true that she sometimes wrote minutely, even pedantically, detailed descriptions more suggestive of James Thomson than of Wordsworth.

2. Other sensitive characters who suffer in an unsympathetic society are transparent alter egos of Smith herself: a succession of irreproachable middle-aged matrons afflicted by irresponsible husbands and dishonest lawyers (Mrs. Stafford in Emmeline, Mrs. Elphinstone in Celestina, Mrs. Denzil in The Banished Man, Leonora in The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer).

3. Smith constantly presents herself as excluded from privileged circles, dropped by her prosperous, conventional friends. As Stuart Curran points out, alienation is the prevailing theme of her Elegiac Sonnets and The Emigrants (“The ‘I’ Altered” 200-201).

4. Emmeline, Smith's first heroine, is more concerned about propriety than any of her later ones: there is more emphasis on her self-command, and she delays tiresomely in confessing her love for Godolphin. She is pointedly differentiated from “a romantic girl” by her ability to distinguish between true love and the mixture of liking, gratitude, and pity that she feels for Delamere (Emmeline 73). Goethe's The Sorrows of Werther is mentioned with disapproval in Emmeline, with sympathy in Celestina and Desmond.

5. Smith herself, remembering that she is writing a realistic novel, concedes that Desmond's feeling is not quite so pure as he intends; he would like physical fulfillment.

6. Celestina, the heroine of Smith's preceding novel, anticipates Desmond's unalterable constancy in her refusal to consider loving any man other than Willoughby, even though she believes they can never marry and she has another devoted and eminently acceptable suitor. In contrast to the lesson inculcated by Richardson, Celestina “found it impossible … to transfer to another the same attachment” she had formed for Willoughby (Celestina 4: 158). Her attitude would be considered (foolishly) romantic by some, but not by anyone who understood her motives (4: 300).

7. In pointed contrast, another woman in the book, Lady Frances Crofts, who commits adultery without the excuse of love, is punished by being immured for life in a convent.

8. Cf. the hero's widowed grandmother in Ethelinde, a common law wife who is presented with utmost sympathy. The only person who receives Orlando kindly when he returns, destitute, to his former home is a kept mistress, who is sensible and generous (Old Manor House). Smith also presented a series of virtuous men married to unworthy wives who are in love with the admirable heroine (Sir Edward Newenden and Ethelinde, Walsingham and Rosalie in Montalbert, and Eversley and Althea in Marchmont).

9. This is no hyperbolic metaphor. Geraldine speaks of herself as the “property” of Verney, and soon afterwards Desmond attacks the institution of Negro slavery (3: 148, 161∗-64∗); husbands and slaveowners shared many of the same powers over their subjects. See Diana Bowstead's analysis (“Charlotte Smith's Desmond”) of the connection between political and sexual oppression in Desmond.

10. In The Old Manor House, Smith had argued effectively for the American Revolutionaries. Stupid Mrs. Rayland and corrupt General Tracy scorn and condemn the “rebels.” Orlando, though fighting in the British army, comes to realize that the Americans are fighting for their just rights.

11. Marchmont is imprisoned for debt, and the system that imprisons him is an indictment of “a country boasting of its enlarged humanity and perfect freedom” (Marchmont 2: 22). He protests that it does little good to punish individual villainous attorneys, when “no radical cure can be administered” to legal abuses, lest it endanger “the sanctity of the laws” (4: 39-40). Appalling Lawyer Vampyre is the more appalling because he is a “legal monster” (4: 180, Smith's italics).

12. For a discussion of (Romantic) imagination in some of Smith's contemporaries, see Katharine M. Rogers, Frances Burney: The World of “Female Difficulties.”

Works Cited

Primary Works

Abrams, M. H. et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 5th ed. New York: Norton, 1986.

Smith, Charlotte. The Banished Man. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1794. 4 vols.

———. Celestina. 1791. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1972.

———. Conversations Introducing Poetry: Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History. 2 vols. London: Sampson Low, 1799.

———. Desmond. 1792. New York: Garland Press, 1974. 3 vols.

———. Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle. 1788. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

———. Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake. London: T. Cadell, 1789. 5 vols.

———. The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. London: Sampson Low, 1800-02. 5 vols.

———. Marchmont. 4 vols. 1796. Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1989.

———. Montalbert. 1795. Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1989. 3 vols.

———. The Old Manor House. 1793. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

———. The Young Philosopher. 1798. New York: Garland Press, 1974. 4 vols.

Secondary Works

Curran, Stuart. “Romantic Poetry: The ‘I’ Altered.” In Mellor, ed., Romanticism and Feminism. 185-207.

Rogers, Katharine M. Frances Burney: The World of “Female Difficulties.” Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.