Alle donne di Inghilterra: le Rural Walks di Charlotte Smith

To the Woman of England: Charlotte Smith’s Rural Walks – Charlotte Smith proposes her children’s literature as a genre shaped by reflections on gender. The work Rural Walks depicts the mother figure as an educational mentor who nurtures and directs the growth of her young girls and as a heroine of daily life. Smith wants to give her female readers a revolutionary version of motherhood, for women are the primary recipients of Mrs. Woodfield’s lessons. While focusing on the mental and moral development of young women, she also attends to her own social and moral responsibilities. Her educational program is comprehensive of unusual fields of knowledge and addresses social issues. In her children’s books Smith instructs her female readers how to apply the social lessons of her literature to their experiences in the real world and how to become politically active citizens. In Rural Walks the dialogues illustrate the overlapping theories on the formation of the self and the education of the woman.

Women’s Fiction

This essay gives an overview of women’s fiction published between the late 18th and early 19th century, focusing on their interest in sensibility, education, and marriage. Women’s novels during this period were very much influenced by the literary genre called the novel of sensibility, which celebrates emotional concepts such as sentiment, delicacy, and sensibility. In promoting education for women, many female novelists not only vindicated women’s capacity to reason, but also recommended moral feeling for others. Although Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Susan Ferrier believed that women should embrace reason, they knew that domestic affections were necessary. Affectionate ties or compassion are key to understanding the novels of Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. Possessing neither was detrimental to the happiness of heroines of this period, and this is typically observed in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) – pursuing one’s desire without restraint would lead to self-destruction. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley were writing their novels when the radical movement connected to Mary Wollstonecraft’s assertion about the need for women’s education had subsided: excessive indulgence of emotions and sexual appetite were cautioned against in their novels. Although in the early 19th-century sexual transgressions were condemned, some novelists such as Charlotte Dacre explored the theme of women’s sexual freedom.

Young Girls on the Move in Charlotte Smith’s Didactic Miscellany Collections

This paper analyses the didactic miscellany collections for young female readers by the English writer Charlotte Smith. In these texts, through dialogues and conversations, the young protagonists are seen to learn from their daily experiences of walking in the natural world. Smith’s texts also offer remarkable examples of girls on the move in another sense, in that some of the young female protagonists appear to be escaping from distressing family and financial circumstances, in search of better life opportunities.

Anna Barbauld and Charlotte Smith on War and Acquiescence

This essay considers works published by two women writers as Britain was preparing for hostilities against revolutionary France in 1793: a Fast Day sermon, Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation, published anonymously by Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith’s novel The Old Manor House, and her blank verse poem The Emigrants. It considers how these works, which condemn the guilt arising from war, expose the problem of necessary acquiescence in what is condemned. Taken together, the writings illuminate two sides of the problem. As a Dissenter, Barbauld belonged to a social group that, during the early years of the French revolution, had reason to feel especially vulnerable to the threat of civil disorder; she therefore had a particular incentive to see the horrors of war abroad in relation to the fear of social unrest at home. For Smith, who identified herself publicly with the landowning classes, and who desired socially appropriate positions for her children, such horrors had to be set against the material opportunities made available by war. In both cases the representation of sympathy for the victims of war provides a way out of the moral impasse they encounter.