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Rotten as Touchwood

Loraine Fletcher, 21 September 1995

The Poems of Charlotte Smith 
edited by Stuart Curran.
Oxford, 335 pp., £35.50, March 1994, 9780195078732
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... Charlotte Smith was the first English novelist to make a castle or great house into an emblem of the state. Before her, houses in novels provided appropriate settings or confined rebellious heroines: Smith introduced the house as a microcosm of the condition of England and a site for the subtlest display of an author’s political loyalties ...

Never mind the neighbours

Margaret Anne Doody, 4 April 1996

Delphine 
by Germaine de Staël, translated by Avriel Goldberger.
Northern Illinois, 468 pp., $50, September 1995, 0 87580 200 1
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... place in English literature. The novel has strong connections with the ‘Jacobin’ novels of Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, Amelia Opie and Thomas Holcroft. The use of engagements and marriages as symptoms of the state of society belongs peculiarly to Charlotte Smith as a Revolutionary subject. To ...

Tit for Tat

Margaret Anne Doody, 21 December 1989

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology 
edited by Roger Lonsdale.
Oxford, 555 pp., £20, September 1989, 0 19 811769 8
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... Their fineness is felt usually more in short lines than long, though some, such as Yearsley and Charlotte Smith, are successful in iambic pentameter blank verse. Poets from Rowe through Yearsley sometimes express an impatient sense of the limitations of language itself, ‘the human line/ Of alphabets (misused)’ (Yearsley), even while they express ...

If It Weren’t for Charlotte

Alice Spawls: The Brontës, 16 November 2017

... Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the ...

Had I been born a hero

Helen Deutsch: Female poets of the eighteenth century, 21 September 2006

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre 
by Paula Backscheider.
Johns Hopkins, 514 pp., £43.50, January 2006, 0 8018 8169 2
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... her anger is similar to the anger that radiates from the work of such writers as Anne Finch and Charlotte Brontë, who write ‘in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth’. Here is Finch, slighted by Pope’s depiction of melancholy poetesses in The Rape of the Lock: Disarm’d with so genteel an air, The contest I give o’er, Yet ...

The Collage Police

Christian Lorentzen: Ali Smith, 8 March 2018

Autumn 
by Ali Smith.
Penguin, 272 pp., £8.99, August 2017, 978 0 241 97331 8
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Winter 
by Ali Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 336 pp., £16.99, November 2017, 978 0 241 20702 4
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... Several factors​ contribute to the innocuousness of Ali Smith’s current project. She’s now published two novels of her projected ‘Seasonal Quartet’: Autumn, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Winter. These books don’t share characters or continuity but constitute a rapid-response literary gloss on the Brexit crisis ...

Lunacies

Ian Campbell Ross: ‘provincial genius’, 23 October 2003

Hermsprong; or Man as He Is Not 
by Robert Bage, edited by Pamela Perkins.
Broadview, 387 pp., £8.99, March 2002, 1 55111 279 5
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... of Lismahago’s captivity among the Miami in Humphry Clinker (1771) and the ambivalence of Charlotte Smith in The Old Manor House (1793). (Writing about these matters in Captives, Linda Colley underestimates the extent to which British perceptions of Native Americans in the period were mediated through fiction.) Among non-fictional accounts, Bage ...

After-Meditation

Thomas Keymer: The Girondin Wordsworth, 18 June 2020

Radical Wordsworth: The Poet who Changed the World 
by Jonathan Bate.
William Collins, 608 pp., £25, April, 978 0 00 816742 4
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William Wordsworth: A Life 
by Stephen Gill.
Oxford, new edition, 688 pp., £25, April, 978 0 19 881711 6
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... him deeply, but in complex ways. Thanks to a letter of introduction from the poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, he met and possibly lodged with the hardline revolutionary Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and is known to have attended a fiery Jacobin Club debate in December 1791. But Brissot broke with the Jacobins a few months later, and Wordsworth’s ...

Travelling Text

Marina Warner: ‘The Arabian Nights’, 18 December 2008

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons.
Penguin, 2715 pp., £125, November 2008, 978 0 14 091166 4
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‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West 
edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum.
Oxford, 337 pp., £55, November 2008, 978 0 19 955415 7
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... sumptuous, a boxed set with metallic blue tooled cloth bindings, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, which reinterpret Oriental motifs. But it hovers uneasily between a scholarly attempt at a definitive edition and a popular (and canny) piece of publishing intended for a wide market. Every translator, Borges said, must work with the orchestration of his ...

Her pen made the first move

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 7 July 1994

Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Chatto, 418 pp., £17.99, March 1994, 9780701161378
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Shared Lives 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Vintage, 285 pp., £6.99, March 1994, 0 09 942461 4
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The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill 
by Miriam Bailin.
Cambridge, 169 pp., £30, April 1994, 0 521 44526 4
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... When Charlotte Brontë was not yet 21, she submitted a sample of her work to the reigning poet laureate, Robert Southey, together with a letter in which she apparently confided her ambition ‘to be for ever known’ as a poet. Three months later, Southey replied. Though he acknowledged her gift and encouraged her to continue writing ‘for its own sake’, he also made clear that her habit of day-dreaming threatened to unfit her for the ‘ordinary uses’ of the world ...

Dining Room Radicals

Rosemary Hill, 7 April 2022

Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age 
by Daisy Hay.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, April 2022, 978 1 78474 018 4
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... arguing that all were excluded from agency in their societies. Another of Johnson’s poets, Charlotte Smith, had managed to escape her violent husband, but struggled to survive because her earnings legally belonged to her spouse. In 1772 Johnson published New Map of the Land of Matrimony by Anna Aikin (later Barbauld), a Swiftian metaphorical atlas ...

Divided We Grow

John Barrell: When Pitt Panicked, 5 June 2003

The London Corresponding Society 1792-99 
edited by Michael T. Davis.
Pickering & Chatto, £495, June 2002, 1 85196 734 6
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Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty 
by Helen Braithwaite.
Palgrave, 243 pp., £45, December 2002, 0 333 98394 7
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... Godwin, Mary Hays, William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Charlotte Smith, John Horne Tooke, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth, as well as a number of theologians and religious controversialists, of writers on science and medicine and so on, whose names were then far more familiar than many ...

Look on the Bright Side

Seamus Perry: Anna Letitia Barbauld, 25 February 2010

Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment 
by William McCarthy.
Johns Hopkins, 725 pp., £32, December 2008, 978 0 8018 9016 1
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... what our fond expectations have led us to expect.’ It was with fellow feeling that she said of Charlotte Smith, whose marriage was in its way no less catastrophic, ‘the life of this lady was a very chequered one.’ In retrospect, the odd defeat of God’s purpose in the early poem about Corsica can be seen to inaugurate a protracted interest in ...

May I come to your house to philosophise?

John Barrell: Godwin’s Letters, 8 September 2011

The Letters of William Godwin Vol. I: 1778-97 
by Pamela Clemit.
Oxford, 306 pp., £100, February 2011, 978 0 19 956261 9
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... the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public intellectuals in the 1790s. The last third is largely taken up by letters to Wollstonecraft, and the ...

To Stir up the People

John Barrell: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm, 23 January 2014

Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s 
by Kenneth Johnston.
Oxford, 376 pp., £30, July 2013, 978 0 19 965780 3
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... had been the mistress of the future George IV; the novelist Mary Hays; and the novelist and poet Charlotte Smith, the best of whose writings, like Thelwall’s Peripatetic, should be recognised as among the greatest works of the period. None of these women was persecuted by the forces of loyalism with quite the venom directed at Johnston’s men, though ...

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