Introduction

Summary

In the time between the promise that I would write this book and its delivery its subjects have outgrown the format. Even five years ago it seemed reasonable to devote only a single volume of this series to Helen Maria Williams and Charlotte Smith, not because their achievements in their lifetime were minor, but because much of their work was still not readily accessible and critical debate on the two was fairly localized. Charlotte Smith, in particular, now seems constrained by the half-volume I have dedicated to her. There is now a collected Works of Charlotte Smith from Pickering and Chatto, Judith Stanton's Collected Letters, as well as Stuart Curran's Oxford edition of her Poems, numerous Broadview editions of her novels and a critical biography. Critical debate has moved well beyond arguing for her inclusion in the Romantic canon. Smith's critics now have enough to say to argue amongst themselves. That would have pleased the querulous Smith. Williams’ status is slighter and scholarly editions of her work are harder to come by, but on-line collections, a recent biography and a growing body of criticism mean that her work is also easier to teach, talk about and take for granted.

In the 1790s, when both women were at the peak of their critical reputations, they were known to each other and often cited together. Smith provided the young William Wordsworth with a letter of introduction to Williams when he visited Orléans in 1791, but Williams had already left for Paris when he arrived. On 18 November 1792, when a group of British exiles living in Paris gathered to celebrate the defeat of the Austrian army by the French, they raised a toast ‘to the Women of Great Britain, particularly those who have distinguished themselves by their writings in favour of the French Revolution, Mrs Smith and Miss H. M. Williams’. Smith had recently written her prorevolutionary novel Desmond and Williams was living in Paris and had completed several volumes of her eight-volume Letters from France. On the other side of the Channel, and on the other side of revolutionary feeling, Smith and Williams were to be joined together more pejoratively in Richard Polwhele's misogynist tirade The Unsex'd Females. The poem tore into the women who had come to prominence through art and literature at the end of the eighteenth century.