Full Description
Desmond is a political novel about the French Revolution. It is Charlotte Smith's only epistolary work, and it is her most politically radical piece. Written in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Smith's Desmond fuses political discussion with romance, social satire and a suspenseful plot revolving around a liberal hero desperately in love with a woman who is married to a drunken anti-revolutionary. Whereas Burke represented the French Revolution as a sentimental drama, Smith draws out the parallel between political and domestic tyranny to show how the disenfranchisement of British women under eighteenth-century common law resembled the political tyranny of the French absolutist monarchy.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Charlotte Smith: A Brief Chronology
Works by Charlotte Smith
Further Reading
A Note on the Text
DESMOND
Preface
Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
Notes
Appendix A. Extract from Edmund Burke,
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Appendix B. Extract from Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
Appendix C. Extract from Helen Maria Williams,
Letters from France
Appendix D. Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants
Appendix E. Charlotte Smith, Letters to
Joseph Cooper Walker and Joel Barlow
