Charlotte Smith's Aesthetic System and the Borders of Romanticism

Abstract

Charlotte Smith's lengthy absence from popular culture has positioned her at the periphery of Romantic studies, yet the visual aspects of her prose exhibit a sustained engagement with Romantic ideals and aesthetic discourse, particularly the sublime. This article thus examines the experiences of Smith's marginalised heroines at physical borderlands in Ethelinde: or the Recluse of the Lake (1789) and Montalbert (1795) in relation to Edmund Burke's classifications of sublime and beautiful landscapes. Smith's protagonists demonstrate that small yet beautiful domestic spaces are places of reflection which provide sanctuary, whilst rugged sublime coastlines evoke extreme emotions and involve mental faculties such as the imagination. In Smith's work, there is an inherent connection between nature and selfhood which becomes the basis for an aesthetic system which expands upon Burkean terminology and constructs a framework for understanding the physical, emotional and psychological aspects of female interactions with the natural world.