SOURCE: Ty, Eleanor. “Contradictory Narratives: Feminine Ideals in Emmeline.” In Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s, pp. 115-29. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Ty discusses Smith's first novel, suggesting that although Smith was constrained by financial considerations and the need to please her readers, her critique of patriarchy is as powerful as those of her more radical peers.

Like Wollstonecraft's Mary, a Fiction and Inchbald's A Simple Story Charlotte Smith's first novel, Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle, may be considered a pre-revolutionary novel because of its composition and publication date of 1788. Yet in this early work Smith already demonstrates a strong feminist sensibility because she, like Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Inchbald, does not hesitate to criticize patriarchy and its ideals, especially the belief in the male figure of authority. Unlike the other more radical and outspoken writers we have examined, Smith...