Emmeline by Charlotte Smith

Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle (1788) was Charlotte Smith’s second novel. Published 1 year after her first novel, The Romance of Real Life (1787), and 4 years after her Elegiac Sonnets (1784), it helped “establish the parameters of a Romantic genre” (Labbe, Introduction. In: Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, edited by Jacqueline M. Labbe. Routledge, London, p 1, 2016) (see “Smith [née Turner], Charlotte”). Generically, Emmeline features elements of the novel of sensibility, the female-authored Gothic (see “Gothic Novels”), and the novel of manners. It also displays a Romantic preoccupation with a restorative nature. While following the conventional marriage plot, Emmeline nevertheless breaks new ground through subtle negotiations of patriarchal property law, generic conventions, and sentimental discourse. The novel was popular: The initial 1500 copies sold out quickly, and a second edition rapidly followed. Smith made approximately £240 on the first two editions. While authors such as Frances Burney could make considerably more, the sales figure was nevertheless significant (see “Burney [later d’Arblay], Frances [also Fanny]”). Walter Scott reminisced fondly about Emmeline in 1821, recollecting the novel’s favorable public reception (Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: a critical biography. Palgrave, London, 1998, 101). A teenaged Jane Austen enjoyed the book, and Jacqueline Labbe (2020) has argued that Emmeline is a foundational influence in Austen’s work (see “Austen, Jane”). Multiple editions of Emmeline were published through the remainder of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century.