A Letter from Charlotte Smith to the Publisher George Robinson
Amy Garnai, editor, Tel Aviv University
Volume 19, no. 4, Summer 2007
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In the introduction to her comprehensive and meticulously annotated edition of the letters of the poet and novelist Charlotte Smith (1749 – 1806), Judith Phillips Stanton writes that “the present volume of letters supplies … almost all of the almost 500 surviving letters that Smith wrote to publishers, patrons, solicitors, relatives and friends.” Among the letters not included in the collection is one to the publisher George Robinson, written while Smith’s novel Desmond (1792) was in the final stages of preparation. This letter, located in the Dyce Collection of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, provides a vignette of Smith at work during a crucial stage of her career, and offers additional insights into the motivations that accompany the preparation of what would become her most politically explicit novel, by which she earned her radical credentials.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Letters/Letter-writing” include:
Friendship, Fainéantise, and Fraternal Correction in Graffigny’s Letters to Devaux 1752–53
by HEIDI BOSTIC (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
“Piety and Popishness”: Tolerance and the Epistolary Reaction to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison
by PATRICK MELLO (ECF 25.3, Spring 2013)
Jane Austen as Editor: Letters on Fiction and the Cancelled Chapters of Persuasion
by KATIE GEMMILL (ECF 24.1, Fall 2011)
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