'Sold, a legal prostitute' when married off at the age of fifteen, Charlotte Smith left her wastrel husband to support herself and their children as a poet and novelist who would have a lasting influence on William Wordsworth and Jane Austen. Combative and witty she became a radical, controversial and very popular author: at a time when the French Revolution was raising high hopes of Reform, she argued for change in England too. Loraine Fletcher's vivid scholarly biography is as readable for the newcomer to the 1790s as for the specialist, tracing the embattled life in the wonderfully self-dramatising fiction.

LORAINE FLETCHER is a Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Reading. She was born in Somerset, grew up on Friday Hill Council Estate in Chingford and went to Woodford County High School and Reading University. She has taught all her adult life in schools, at evening classes as a private tutor, at Stanford University's base in England and currently in the English Department at Reading University. She has lived in America for over eleven years at various times and places from the sixties to the eighties. She took her MA at Arizona State University and her PhD at Birkbeck. She is the widow of the poet and 1890s scholar Ian Fletcher, has two daughters and lives in Reading.

Acknowledgements Introduction Exile Writing to Live Girondism An Interest in Green Leaves The Goddess of Botany Jane Austen Beachy Head Charlotte Smith's Works in Chronological Order Editions of Charlotte Smith's Works Cited Primary Sources Secondary Sources