Charlotte Smith A Critical Biography Author:Loraine Fletcher "Sold, a legal prostitute" in marriage at fifteen, Charlotte Smith left her wastrel husband to support their children as a novelist. Combative and witty, she became a radical, controversial and very popular author at the time when the French Revolution raised high hopes of Reform; she had a lasting influence on the adolescent Jane Austen. Lorain... more »e Fletcher's vivid scholarly biography is as readable for the newcomer to the 1790s as for the specialist, tracing an embattled life in wonderfully self-dramatizing fiction.« less