ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Charlotte Smith's prolonged and progressive engagement with the politics of revolution through the representations of the American War of Independence that function in a number of her novels as both overt and covert sites for the discussion of events in France. The American War of Independence makes a guest appearance in a surprisingly large number of late eighteenth-century British novels. In the Analytical Review, Mary Wollstonecraft quoted Smith's preface in full, praising her inclusion of 'the French Revolution, and the present state of France' and warmly commending a novel in which 'the cause of freedom is defended with warmth'. Desmond, alone among Smith's novels, is cast in the epistolary format common both to eighteenth-century sentimental fiction and to polemical treatises such as Reflections. The European Magazine considered that the novel 'vindicated the cause of French liberty with much acuteness' and applauded Smith as a writer whose work 'towers above the common productions of the day'.
