Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (review)

REVIEWS 367 paintings, and a fan. By "extending the boundaries of the 'text' of Pamela ... reexamining it as a work, as a cultural artifact that includes many material texts and even nontextual artifacts" (p. 58), Fysh's objective is to come to a better understanding of its meaning and to arrive at the social function of its offshoots. Through both her approach to and her interest in this non-literary aspect ofa novel she manages to unearth fascinating new material. In her investigation of Clarissa, Fysh returns to the theme of a printer's control overhis text. She analyses the varying typographicalrenditions ofPaper X and, in a survey of the positions ofrecent literary critics, draws attention to possibly flawed readings. Her main contribution to scholarship in this chapter is the evidence she collects on the considerable control Richardson exerted as his own printer over his work, and thus again emphasizes an aspect hitherto neglected in literary criticism. Taking as a starting point the pamphlet war over the publication of Sir Charles Grandison, Fysh shows that Richardson's last novel "demonstrates an intersection of various meanings and conceptions of 'property' in the mid-eighteenth century: ofliterary and theoretical property; ofthoughts on gardens, estate management , and houses; and of women as property" (p. 100). She succinctly establishes Richardson's connection of the concept of ownership with questions of morality and originality. The themes ofcontrol and property, representing the major threads whichrun through this study, are again addressed in the concludingchapter, mainly in order to emphasize once again the legitimacy and importance of the materialist criticism Fysh practises. Stephanie Fysh convincingly argues and demonstrates that the division of bibliography from criticism is no longer desirable or even defensible: "The book is not a context for the 'text,' it is the text as it exists in the world" (p. 128), she rightly argues. Her concentration on the materiality and historicity of literary works, an approach which yields fascinating insights in the period and processes oftheir production , is a commendable example of practised interdisciplinarity and deserves many readers. Brigitte Glaser Universität Eichstätt Loraine Fletcher. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. New York: St Martin's Press, 1998. xi + 401pp. US$49.95. ISBN 0-312-21587-8. Surely the most prolific of eighteenth-century Englishwomen who lived by the pen, Charlotte Smith published ten novels, five distinct volumes of poetry, several children's books, a play, two translations from French, and a semi-fictional journalistic account of a shipwreck. One of her collections of verse, Elegiac Sonnets , went through ten editions in her lifetime as she steadily enlarged it. As early as 1791, after the appearance of her third novel, a reviewer in the Critical Review declared that Smith divided supremacy as novelist only with Frances Burney, to whom, he added, she had showed herself in some respects superior. 368 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:3 Moreover, as she was the first to proclaim, Smith lived a life rich in varied and dramatic misfortune. Married young and inappropriately, she bore eleven children before leaving her husband for good. Benjamin Smith, an inveterate gambler, could not settle to any consistent occupation, despite the existence ofa prosperous family business. He shared no interests with his wife. Flagrantly unfaithful, pursuing liaisons with servants even in the presence of his children, he squandered his wife's money as well as his own and finally, apparently, turned violent towards her. Long after she left him, he laid claim to her writing income, even demanding to negotiate with a publisher over one of her novels. Two children died in infancy. A beloved daughter died at the age of twenty. A soldier-son survived the loss of a leg in battle only to die before he was thirty. Losses both human and economic marked every stage of Charlotte Smith's experience. She hated lawyers. Litigation over her father-in-law's estate, which he had intended to protect her children, attained Bleak House proportions, stretching for almost forty years, during which she received little. The lawsuit was settled only after her death. Friendly with Mary Hays and William Godwin, she entertained revolutionary ideas. She dared to speculate about sexual freedom for women...