Desmond is a political novel about the French Revolution. It is Charlotte Smith’s only epistolary work, and it is her most politically radical piece. Written in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Smith’s Desmond fuses political discussion with romance, social satire and a suspenseful plot revolving around a liberal hero desperately in love with a woman who is married to a drunken anti-revolutionary. Whereas Burke represented the French Revolution as a sentimental drama, Smith draws out the parallel between political and domestic tyranny to show how the disenfranchisement of British women under eighteenth-century common law resembled the political tyranny of the French absolutist monarchy.
- ISBN13 9781551112749
- Publish Date 30 August 2001
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 11 March 2021
- Publish Country CA
- Imprint Broadview Press Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 488
- Language English