Charlotte Smith's Literary Exile

Abstract

Frequently praised for the way in which her landscape descriptions copy nature, and often charged with plagiarism, Charlotte Smith unsettles distinctions made by contemporaries between art's imitation of nature and its imitation of other texts. Her fiction, in particular, suggests that for Smith the authenticity promised by properly mirroring nature is inextricable from less respectable modes of copying. This essay addresses the relation between Smith's imitative aesthetic—broadly characterized as encompassing various modes of copying—and her biographical experience of exile and alienation, which she copies into the novels not as an "original," but as an imitation that proliferates through a structural principle of copying.