‘She is too good, or, at least, too silent for one to be comfortable with her’. Thus, in the opening of Charlotte Smith's comedy What Is She? (1798), the maid Winifred describes the elusive character of her otherwise irreproachable mistress Mrs Derville. The same feeling of discomfort is emphasized by the lady's suitor, Lord Orton, who, disguised as the impecunious and troubled Mr Belford, exclaims: ‘Incomprehensible woman! Her situation, her mind, every thing about her, is mysterious. Yet my heart mocks at the doubts of my reason, and I have scarcely courage to wish them satisfied – yet I must know more of her, or endeavour to forget that I have known her at all’. Thus Smith posits the mysterious woman as the centre of her play's action and the pivot in the love-story which, in line with comedic convention, is its thematic, affective and ideological mainstay. In addition, the fact that both Winifred and Orton/Belford are affected by Mrs Derville's unusual behaviour stresses the profound impact of her own enigma on the community of people around her. Accordingly, an irresistible curiosity urges the dramatis personae to pry into her identity and seek to reconstruct the narrative of her life.

Placing Mrs Derville under the joint headings of mystery and secrecy, Smith increases her long list of suffering, persecuted female wanderers. Also in the generic context of the drama Smith's use of curiosity does not represent a drastic departure from an eighteenth-century tradition numbering such influential precedents as Susanna Centlivre's The Busy Body (1709), one of the most successful of eighteenth-century plays, the plot of which is increasingly complicated by the curiosity of the aptly named Marplot, or George Lillo's 1737 tragedy The Fatal Curiosity, later adapted by George Colman as Fatal Curiosity (1782). In addition, by consigning her female protagonist to the scrutiny of countless observers, she includes her in a series of ideologically weighted concerns typical of the political and cultural climate of 1790s Britain with its alternate tension of political subversion and regulatory containment.