![]() ![]() It was so popular with readers that many went to the Lake District and came away disappointed that it wasn’t real. Ethelinde opens at Grasmere Castle, a fictional castle in the Lake District. The Romantic Movement is usually dated from 1798 when Wordsworth and Coleridge published The Lyrical Ballads, but there is much in Smith that shows Romanticism was already alive a decade earlier. In this novel, Ethelinde has both middle class and wealthy relatives, none of whom are quite as comical as in Evelina, but who still have comical elements and some of them are far more cruel in their snobbery and putting on airs once Ethelinde finds herself largely without a protector and penniless.īut what most interested me about this novel was how it is a precursor to Romanticism and Radcliffean Gothic. In Evelina, the title character is more or less persecuted by her middle class relatives who lack genteel manners. Ethelinde is also subjected to a host of disagreeable relatives, which reminded me a great deal of Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778). At one point, Ethelinde is in danger of being raped, a clear nod to Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). There is much in the novel that owes a debt to earlier sentimental or sensibility novels and the novel of manners. When I read Ethelinde, I really felt like it was a bridge between the earlier eighteenth century novelists and Radcliffe and Austen. In her introduction, Moody draws parallels between the novel and Austen’s Mansfield Park specifically. I would certainly not consider Ethelinde to be Gothic, but there are some Gothic elements in it, and Moody says that it was an influential novel upon Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen, which I can well believe. Moody had previously told me that Smith uses Gothic elements in her novels, although none of the novels can be rightly termed Gothic. Upon reading this book, I could well see why Moody feels such enthusiasm for Smith. The novel has just been released for the first time in a critical edition by Valancourt Books, complete with an introduction and notes by Ellen Moody. By her second novel, Smith had matured into an accomplished novelist. ![]() Then I read Smith’s second novel, Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake (1789). I couldn’t help but be reminded of Radcliffe when I read it-the sinister uncle, the illegitimacy, all feel very Gothic, although it is not a Gothic novel.Ĭharlotte Smith’s second novel, Ethelinde, has just been released by Valancourt Books as a critical edition with an introduction by Ellen Moody. Emmeline also has a series of troublesome suitors before she marries the man she loves. The plot concerns an orphan, the believed illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, who, to make a long story short, discovers she is the legitimate daughter of her father and therefore the rightful heir to the castle, despite the manipulations of a rather sinister uncle. The first, Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle, was a bit immature in style and structure, but it set the tone for much of her later work. She also wrote ten novels that were very popular and influential in their day. She was a poet much respected by the Romantics-in fact, she was a distant relative by marriage of Wordsworth and gave him letters of introduction when he went to France. Then I began to wonder why I had never heard of her. This blog might well be titled, “Charlotte Smith, where have you been all my life?” because Smith was a major influence on the development of the early novel, and yet I only just discovered Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) about a year ago when my friend Ellen Moody began blogging about her.
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