The Picturesque, the Sublime, the Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) by Valerie Derbyshire (review)

As the field of Charlotte Smith studies has flourished over the last several decades, this versatile Romantic-era writer has been explored through numerous literary and historical roles: amateur botanist, prolific novelist, leading figure of the sonnet revival, and woman poet admitted to the exclusive boys' club of High Romantic versifiers. In The Picturesque, the Sublime, the Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), Valerie Derbyshire recasts Smith once more by tracing her relationships to key visual artists of the late eighteenth century and analyzing her skillful use of popular artistic tropes to achieve narrative innovation and social critique. Such an approach frees Smith from familiar comparisons to William Wordsworth and company, instead placing her within an artistic coterie that includes contemporary portraitists George Romney and James Northcote, alongside lesser-known figures like Smith's childhood drawing master and a father-daughter pair of engravers who influenced Smith's later thinking about art as social commentary.

By recreating these historical exchanges, Derbyshire's book presents Smith's fiction (and a sampling of her poetry) as fundamentally interdisciplinary and deeply engaged in discussions of gender, labor, class, and politics in the late eighteenth century. This line of inquiry considers aesthetic theory—from the conventions of botanical illustration to the major artistic categories in Derbyshire's title and even to the rules of English heraldry—as more than a set of visual cues; in Smith's writing, such tropes form "a mode of interpretation as well as a means of representation" (p. 4). Derbyshire thus highlights not only Smith's artistic literacy but also her imaginative uses of artistic language to create narrative instabilities and expose social ones.

The capaciousness of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and the heft of Smith's oeuvre make for a daunting critical combination, but Derbyshire manages this union with an effective organizational scheme, frequent historical grounding, and coherent movement between the sister methodologies of visual analysis and close reading. After an introduction that pairs a few elegiac sonnets with contemporaneous botanical drawings, each subsequent chapter explores an aesthetic concept with reference to a representative artist Smith knew and a particular novel Smith wrote. For example, chapter two uses Smith's connection to George Smith of Chichester, a practitioner of picturesque landscape drawing and Smith's own childhood drawing master, to explain how the superficially pleasing forms of the picturesque unsettle social expectations in Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle (1788). Lest this structure seem formulaic, Derbyshire admits overlapping themes in Smith's fiction and sometimes leaves the trope-artist-novel chapter model to highlight an artistic school or tradition. Notable such deviations occur in chapter five, which explores the influence of John Raphael Smith and Emma Smith, and chapter six, which traces heraldic imagery in Celestina (1791). Across Derbyshire's monograph, readings of Smith's novels appear alongside plentiful images—many in color—that illuminate the sharing of aesthetic ideas across creative disciplines in the Romantic age. Indeed, Derbyshire's method of pairing novelistic scenes with paintings underlines the sense that "Smith accesses these artistic tropes in order to aestheticise her own fiction and question the very nature and reliability of storytelling itself" (pp. 271-72).

Derbyshire's innovative claim for the novel as a principal vehicle for Smith's project of aestheticization expands recent critical conversations, which have tended to emphasize poetry as the site of nature imagery and aesthetic principle in Romantic literature. This generic shift and its attendant discussion of realism distinguish Derbyshire's research from foundational work by Smith scholars like Stuart Curran and Jacqueline M. Labbe; these new approaches also necessitate that Derbyshire treat characters—not just landscapes—as aestheticized elements in Smith's novels. The book accomplishes this unconventional handling of character with varying degrees of success. For instance, the Romney and Northcote portraits cited...