'Sold, a legal prostitute' when married off at the age of fifteen, Charlotte Smith left her wastrel husband to support herself and their children as a poet and novelist who would have a lasting influence on William Wordsworth and Jane Austen. Combative and witty she became a radical, controversial and very popular author: at a time when the French Revolution was raising high hopes of Reform, she argued for change in England too. Loraine Fletcher's vivid scholarly biography is as readable for the newcomer to the 1790s as for the specialist, tracing the embattled life in the wonderfully self-dramatising fiction.
'Fletcher's biography is as compulsive as any novel, and it makes the reader simply long to read, and experience the redoubtable Mrs Smith at first hand.' - Kate Saunders, New Statesman
'...a substantial contribution to studies of women in the 'Romantic' period, lively in its detail, wide-ranging in its argument; seeing Smith as a significant judge of her own turbulent times, and as an influence on her literary successors.' - Times Literary Supplement
'two aspects from a biography in which there is so much to praise. An undisguised partiality wafts from the pages like a breath of fresh air amid the stuffiness of academia. Second, Fletcher's analyses of the novels are some of the most valuable pieces of criticism ever written on Smith.' - Paul Jarman, The Independent
'...a substantial contribution to studies of women in the 'Romantic' period, lively in its detail, wide-ranging in its argument; seeing Smith as a significant judge of her own turbulent times, and as an influence on her literary successors.' - Times Literary Supplement
'two aspects from a biography in which there is so much to praise. An undisguised partiality wafts from the pages like a breath of fresh air amid the stuffiness of academia. Second, Fletcher's analyses of the novels are some of the most valuable pieces of criticism ever written on Smith.' - Paul Jarman, The Independent