ABSTRACT
Charlotte Smith and Godwin became friends in the late 1790s and their friendship clearly played a significant role in Smith's conception and design of The Young Philosopher. In The Young Philosopher Smith seems to have been experimenting with expanding and refashioning the complex manner with which she characteristically interwove passages of first-person and third-person narrative as she developed her characters' stories. Smith praises Wollstonecraft's talents and asserts that had she borrowed from Wollstonecraft she would be proud to acknowledge it, and she does in fact allude to the novel and to Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden at two other points in The Young Philosopher. In The Young Philosopher, Smith proliferates a host of speaking voices and individual narratives to a much greater and more complex degree than ever before. Her reading of Godwin and Wollstonecraft and her reception into Godwin's circle as of 1797 suggests that there may be a distinctly political resonance to this particular development in her narrative style.
