Inviting conflict: The role of the slave in Charlotte Smith’s biographical aesthetic

Unlike many of her female contemporaries, who shunned public scrutiny of their private lives, Charlotte Smith invited biographical readings of her work. In prologues and prefaces, which engendered both sympathy and derision, Smith decries her position as a wronged wife and highlights her devotion as a working mother. Similarly suffering, saintly wives and abusive husbands populate her fiction, while the speakers of her popular Elegiac Sonnets bemoan their tragic lot. Critics still follow the author's invitation. However, what do we do when the facts of a biography unsettle the aesthetic project supposedly based on it? This essay tackles this question by arguing that while Smith uses the figure of the slave in her writing as a rhetorical and aesthetic device to emphasize the often gendered injustice she faced, both her 1796 novel Marchmont and her letters reveal how the pathos produced by this figure collides with the monetary potential of enslaved persons' labor. Smith's antislavery views appear in her poetry and novels, such as Marchmont, in which the title character is imprisoned for debt and describes himself as a slave; however, it is income from enslaved persons that ultimately enables his freedom. A similar irony reappears four years after Marchmont's publication, when Smith negotiated the sale of a Barbados estate owned by a family trust. This essay asks how far Smith's apparent invitation to read autobiographically really goes and how, as critics, we should grapple with this approach when it produces conflicting accounts not only in her literary texts, but also within her biography itself.