The Young Philosopher: A Novel. In Four Volumes.

Bookseller Notes

Charlotte Turner Smith's life and works are intricately connected. Her first publication 'Elegiac Sonnets' was written in debtors' prison, its immediate success allowing Turner Smith to pay for the release of both herself and her husband; yet despite critical recognition for her poetry, now regarded as highly influential for the Romantic movement, it was the novel form that she turned to in the 1790s, writing at speed, driven by financial necessity. While these works conformed to the character considered appropriate for women's fiction at the time, with romance, chaste heroines, and dire situations to the fore, Smith's radical views, not least her anti-slavery stance (despite financially benefitting from the Barbados plantations of her father-in-law) became more prominent. Her literary circle included Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe and Henrietta O'Neil, but it was Robert Southey who wrote sympathetically of her hard-earned achievements: '[though] she has done more and done better than other women writers, it has not been her whole employment she is not looking out for admiration and talking to show off.' (Radcliffe, David Hill (ed.). Commentary: William Wordsworth on Charlotte Smith (1835). English Poetry 15791830.)The outlook of this, her final novel, is bleak: the suffering of individuals is at odds with the idealism of the French Revolution, England is lost and the only hope lies in a vague notion of America.