254 Norma Clarke
creating her authorial persona (Labbe 2010, 218). Novelists also used pref-
atory notes and essays to address readers, setting up a dynamic between
the author-persona and the fi ctional characters and events that followed.
Mistress of this technique in the 1780s and 1790s was the very successful
poet and novelist Charlotte Smith.
For many readers, Charlotte Smith’s life exemplifi ed the “wrongs of
woman.” Wollstonecraft knew her story well because, like other readers of
Smith’s novels and poetry, she had also read the prefaces where Charlotte
Smith “made her sorrows a conspicuous subject” (Fletcher 1998, 93). In
reviewing Smith’s Marchmont in 1796, Wollstonecraft reproved those who
criticized Smith for this practice. The author’s manner of “alluding to her
domestic sorrows,” she wrote, should excite sympathy and excuse the ac-
rimonious tone (Wollstonecraft 1989, 5:485). There was much for Smith
to be acrimonious about. Married off at fi fteen to the son of a wealthy
merchant, she had given birth to ten children (six of whom survived) by
the time she was thirty, and had discovered that her husband, Benjamin,
was a ne’er-do-well who would never provide for them. Benjamin’s foolish
actions led to heavy debts; meanwhile, his father’s attempt — in a muddled,
self-written will— to protect his grandchildren led to legal entanglements
that went on for decades. In 1783 and 1784, Benjamin Smith was in prison,
and his wife stayed there with him for much of that time. The Elegiac
Sonnets, and Other Essays (1784), which were to go through many edi-
tions, appeared while Smith was still imprisoned. (Mary Robinson, another
fi fteen-year-old opportunistically married off, had also published a volume
of poems while living in King’s Bench Prison with her wastrel husband,
Thomas, who had been arrested for debt in 1775.) Charlotte Smith legally
separated from her husband in 1785 (having borne two more children).
No formal fi nancial settlement was agreed. As her husband, he still owned
everything she possessed, and was entitled to take and sell what he chose.
She had everything to fear from him, especially when desperation about his
gambling debts drove him to descend on her and treat her with more than
his usual brutality. She moved with her family from place to place, keeping
up all the while a prodigious output of the writing on which they depended
for funds. In her prefaces Smith invited readers to sympathize with her
plight, and in her fi ctions she drew on barely disguised autobiographical
materials to question issues like the laws regarding marriage and property
that were causing her so much grief (Fletcher 1998).
Charlotte Smith publicly expressed her admiration for Wollstonecraft’s
writing. Although not part of the circle of writers published by Joseph
Johnson, and generally not living in London, she met Wollstonecraft at