To hear Charlotte Smith talk about her writing, you would think she was a drudge or even a hack, ‘compelled’, as she now famously put it, ‘to live only to write & write only to live’. Her letters to publishers are long on publishing detail – how many sheets to a volume; how many volumes to a novel; how much she would be paid for each – and not just short, but wholly lacking, in any claim to art. Except that she is continually ordering or borrowing books from them, she seems to have her nose to a grindstone and her eyes shut to all literary value. Only occasionally, most conspicuously in her letters to her Dublin friend, Rev. Joseph Cooper Walker, who selflessly oversaw her fortunes in Ireland, and in those late, wonderfully animated letters to Sarah Rose, does her sense of literary merit show through. There, indeed, one suddenly discovers someone who is reading every principal piece of literature available and commenting sharply upon the success or lack thereof of many contemporary productions. She complains to Walker of Edgeworth's Belinda that ‘the harshness & rude manner of the execution is unpleasing’ and to Mrs Rose that she ‘thought [Godwin 's] Fleetwood very la la – not to say a disagreeable Novel … Men very seldom write pleasing novel s’. To an unknown correspondent on New Year's Day of 1805 she wryly remarks that for her friend Godwin, ‘Novel writing is not his forte but his foible’. Frequently, as in this same letter, she notes archly how badly written and derivative much of the current literary production is. Here, then, is a person with a highly developed sense of taste who in her occasional foray into literary criticism meticulously distinguishes the styles and trends in contemporary literature. Still, we do not look in her correspondence for an extensive critique of other writers or for an analytical account of her own processes and aims as a writer. The kind of self-reflection of a Keats or a Byron is, unfortunately, foreign to the nature of her correspondence.

““Well, Miss Elliot . . . we shall never agree I suppose upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse . . . I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.” “Perhaps I shall. - Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove any thing.”” (Persuasion, chapter 23) / Coming very near the end of Austen's last novel (1818), this sharp observation on the gender biases inherent in literary discourse has often been taken as a characteristically oblique expression of her feminism as well as a defense of her singular craft. Notwithstanding the truth that the passage reveals considerable self-reflection, the ironies (the pen is after all in Austen's hand) attending that traditional reading are manifold: it demands that we accept at face value what is, both in the novel and life, knowingly, wittily, undercut. Within the structure of the novel, this crucial exchange between Captain Harville and Anne Elliot is in some sense the turning point, as Anne, ostensibly asserting woman's constancy in the abstract, speaks over Harville's shoulder specifically to address Wentworth, who is across the room writing a letter. In essence her contrived indirect discourse allows him the objectivity needed to lay down that pen of self-centered inscription and at last “read” the truth of her love for him.

Ages are marked by literary fashion as much as by their political settlements or upheavals. We speak commonly of Elizabethan drama or of Enlightenment prose, thereby defining the epoch generically and even temperamentally. The continuing preoccupation with “Renaissance self-fashioning” only puts a modern gloss on the conventional notion that it was an age for drama. The eighteenth century has long been conceived as inseparable from its monumental achievements in prose, works reflecting the massive organization and integration of European civilization - the French Encyclopédie, Johnson's Dictionary, even, seemingly almost as long, Richardson's Clarissa. What is it, then, that makes us commonly associate British Romanticism with poetry? Why, indeed, until recently did we generally separate the writers of prose - except for literary theorists like Coleridge and Hazlitt - from the poets, pretending, for instance, that Jane Austen inhabited a world fundamentally different from that of Shelley rather than living at the same time and, indeed, about twenty-five miles from his birthplace, and writing constantly about families that easily could pass for Shelley's own? The Victorians started this conventional association almost as a way of distinguishing their epoch, another age of prose or at least to their minds of robust narrative, from that softer, more emotional, more lyrical world that preceded theirs, an irrecoverable infancy to which they longed to retreat.

Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca was a novel surprisingly long in its gestation. Although not published until 1823, its inception actually dates from six years earlier. “I first thought of it in our library in Marlow,” Mary Shelley wrote as she was completing it in 1821 (L I 203), thus placing its beginnings at some point in 1817. She does not stipulate what book in the library which she and Percy Bysshe Shelley had assembled in Marlow prompted her to conceive the idea of this new novel, nor is there anything in either's correspondence that would further elucidate her claim. But among the components of an ideal library P. B. Shelley later enumerated to his cousin Thomas Medwin were the writings of Nicolo Machiavelli, the Italian Renaissance political theorist. Beginning with the first English translations of The Prince in the early seventeenth century, it became a common practice to append to that work Machiavelli's admiring biographical account of Castruccio Castracani dei Antelminelli, the warlord of fourteenth-century Lucca, whom Machiavelli, in 1520, looked back on as an exemplary Italian “prince.” This is the work that Mary Shelley denigrates in the first sentence of her Preface to the novel as a mere “romance” (V i 5). One might therefore infer that Mary Shelley's original idea for the novel centered on simply setting the record straight about Castruccio; her original title - The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca - focusing on him alone, would seem to substantiate that inference. The change in title by which Valperga became centered was owing to Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, who reconfigured the novel's balance by emphasizing its female protagonist, the Countess of Valperga, a fictional Tuscan duchy.

Coming very near the end of Austen's last novel (1818), this sharp observation on the gender biases inherent in literary discourse has often been taken as a characteristically oblique expression of her feminism as well as a defense of her singular craft. Notwithstanding the truth that the passage reveals considerable self-reflection, the ironies (the pen is after all in Austen's hand) attending that traditional reading are manifold: it demands that we accept at face value what is, both in the novel and life, knowingly, wittily, undercut.

Ages are marked by literary fashion as much as by their political settlements or upheavals. We speak commonly of Elizabethan drama or of Enlightenment prose, thereby defining the epoch generically and even temperamentally. The current preoccupation with “Renaissance self-fashioning” only puts a modern gloss on the conventional notion that it was an age for drama. The eighteenth century has long been conceived as inseparable from its monumental achievements in prose, works reflecting the massive organization and integration of European civilization - the French Encyclopaedia, Johnson's Dictionary, even, seemingly almost as long, Richardson's Clarissa. What is it, then, that makes us commonly associate British Romanticism with poetry? Why, indeed, until recently did we generally separate the writers of prose - except for literary theorists like Coleridge and Hazlitt - from the poets, pretending, for instance, that Jane Austen inhabited a world fundamentally different from that of Shelley rather than living at the same time and, indeed, about twenty-five miles from his birthplace, and writing constantly about families that easily could pass for Shelley's own?