SOURCE: Fry, Carrol L. “The French Revolution in Charlotte Smith's Works: Desmond, The Emigrants, and The Banished Man.” In Charlotte Smith, pp. 64-88. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Fry discusses Smith's innovative use of contemporary political events in her novels and poetry.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven!(1) 

So wrote Wordsworth of the early days of the French Revolution after he arrived in Paris in 1791, the times that Charlotte Smith describes in volume 3 of Celestina. While he is in France, Willoughby mentions “hearing, and but hearing, at a distance, the tumults, with which a noble struggle for freedom at this time (the summer of 1789) agitated the capital, and many of the great towns of France” (III, 181). Later, in the digression that tells his life, Bellegarde praises the “glorious flame of liberty”—the fall of the...