A significant programme of historical and feminist recovery has ensured that Charlotte Smith is now widely recognized as a central figure in the Romantic canon, and the recent publication of her collected works affirms the richness and determination that characterize her radical response to the French Revolution. This essay approaches Smith's prolonged and progressive engagement with the politics of revolution through the representations of the American War of Independence that function in a number of her novels as both overt and covert sites for the discussion of events in France. In Desmond(1792), The Old Manor House (1793) and The Young Philosopher (1798), Smith reaches back to an earlier generation, using the American War of the 1770s to embody and critique the ideological collisions that were re-enacted in Europe during the 1790s. In so doing she produces something that begins to resemble the classical historical novel defined by Lukacs, usually considered to have been inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott.

The American War of Independence makes a guest appearance in a surprisingly large number of late eighteenth-century British novel s. As they gaze uncertainly from the imperial centre towards a distant colonial periphery, novelists of the 1780s and 1790s express the profound anxieties concerning contested definitions of identity and allegiance that were provoked by a quarrel which divided the British people and eroded cherished perceptions of the nation as the epitome of constitutional liberty, civic virtue and patriotic endeavour. Contributing both directly and indirectly to debates about the condition of Britain and the direction of its imperial ventures, their fictional and quasifictional representations of the war locate themselves within a public discourse of politics, nationalism and domestic morality which, from 1789 onwards, was dominated by the intellectual and political ferment associated with the French Revolution. If we examine the ways in which Smith revised her accounts of the American War as she promoted and defended her reformist agenda in response to changing events in France and increasing repression in Britain, we can trace a progression from the confident optimism of Desmond, through the anxieties of The Old Manor House towards the disillusion of The Young Philosopher.