CHARLOTTE SMITH'S DESMOND: THE HISTORICAL NOVEL AS SOCIAL PROTEST

This essay builds upon the recognition of Charlotte Smith's Desmond (1792) as the original historical novel in Europe to demonstrate that Desmond is also the unacknowledged progenitor of a significant tradition of feminist novels of social protest. Sir Walter Scott, assumed until recently to be the father of the historical novel with Waverley (1814), displaced his novels into the past and chose heroes with moderate and sometimes shifting political allegiances in an effort to eschew partisanship and claim objectivity. Charlotte Smith, on the other hand, clearly envisaged an activist purpose for the historical novel. As the fates of her characters are determined by contemporaneous French Revolutionary turmoil, she asserts in her preface that the political debates foregrounded in her novel are meant to join forces with the works of learning and genius in the cause of truth, reason and humanity. In its treatment of marriage, the family, and female sexuality, as well as its privileging of first-person epistolary and confessional narration, Desmond establishes a tradition of feminist novels that continues from Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798) and Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) to the novels of self-discovery so central to feminist writing today.