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...