Afterword

Summary

The works of Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams share a historical moment and a cultural context. Broadly liberal in their treatment of key political issues on the 1780s to the early 1800s (and beyond for Williams), their rhetoric is at times boldly revolutionary, at others, uncertain, disillusioned and despairing. Williams and Smith understand the language and transformative powers of sensibility, and the significance of subjective experience and of moral adjudication in the representation of history. They each make a case for bringing women's perspectives into public life, by virtue of lives that have more enforced ‘privacy’ than men's, and to use such perspectives to effect change in the moral, as well as the political, landscape.

Both women become sceptical of the ideal of social transparency that was such a positive force for change at the beginning of the French revolution. This scepticism was inflected partly by the revolution's turn to Terror, but also by their awareness of women's different experiences of changing social mores. Both Smith and Williams recognized that they lived in a culture that had more exacting standards for women than for men in terms of their interior morality, and that women had more to lose by self-revelation and ‘transparent’ conduct.

This distrust of transparency may be one reason why the relationship between the lives and the works of these women is not straightforward. I have emphasized throughout this book the ‘mediated’ character of both women's self-representations. While Smith is recognized for her autobiographical presence in many of her texts, it is a performative, rather than a directly expressive, presence. It is more dominant, too, at the beginning of her writing career than at the end, in the Elegiac Sonnets more than in Beachy Head. The trajectory of Williams’ self-representation goes in the opposite direction. The third-person speakers of the early, mannered poetry gives way to the first-person narrator of the Letters from France and the Swiss Tour; still, however, there is little autobiographical disclosure or reflection in her work, until hints at an interior life come to the fore in the later poetry of the 1820s. Whether Williams lost the fear of selfdisclosure after the death of Stone, and Smith tired of selfrevelation, we can only speculate. However, we can make no easy correlation between biographical events and their textual representation.