SOURCE: Stanton, Judith. “Charlotte Smith and ‘Mr. Monstroso’: An Eighteenth-Century Marriage in Life and Fiction.” Women's Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 7, no. 1 (2000): 7-22.

In the following essay, Stanton examines Smith's letters and concludes that her husband, Benjamin Smith, provided the model for many of the antagonists in her novels.

Benjamin Smith was rich, charming and handsome. Yet his miserable 41-year marriage to Charlotte Smith was an almost textbook case of the atrocities a man could legally inflict upon his wife and children in eighteenth-century England Her two most reliable biographers until recently¹ shed little light on what led the 37 year-old Charlotte Smith to leave her husband, taking her seven children with her. Catherine Ann Dorset, Charlotte's sister, was no doubt being discreet about her brother-in-law's outrages. F. M. A. Hilbish, writing in the 1930s, brings more serious charges against him, but only by shrewdly interpreting Charlotte's barely...