Desmond - Broadview Literary Texts Author:Charlotte Smith Desmond is a political novel about the French Revolution. It is Charlotte Smiths only epistolary work, and it is her most politically radical piece. Written in response to Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France, Smiths Desmond fuses political discussion with romance, social satire and a suspenseful plot revolving... more » 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.« less