"Scarce first French translation of Charlotte Smith's first novel, Emmeline, the orphan of the castle, published in the same year as the first edition. '"Emmeline" anticipates both the scenery and maidenly crises of Mrs Radcliffe's novels in both its pictorial and psychological qualities. The heroine, Emmeline has an almost pathological craving for fearful situations and is even confined to a castle by her miscreant guardian, Montreville. J.M.S. Tompkins [in The popular novel in England, 1770-1800, 1932] correctly credits Charlotte Smith and not Mrs Radcliffe with the perfection of the maiden of the maiden-centered Gothic romance in her observation that "it is Charlotte Smith who first begins to explore in fiction the possibilities of the Gothic castle. Her Emmeline is the first heroine whose beauty is seen glowing against that grim background, or who is hunted along the passages at night". Emmeline's prison, the great Castle of Mowbray, anticipates the castles of Mrs Radcliffe's Italy, but Charlotte Smith was not willing to endow the castle with the properties of terror which the building always has in the high Gothic' (Frank, The first Gothics, 1987, p. 367). Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) was an English Romantic poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels of sensibility. A successful writer, she published ten novels, three books of poetry, four children's books, and other assorted works, over the course of her career. She saw herself as a poet first and foremost, poetry at that period being considered the most exalted form of literature. Scholars now credit her with transforming the sonnet into an expression of woeful sentiment. After the present work she wrote nine more novels over the next ten years: Ethelinde (1789), Celestina (1791), Desmond (1792), The old manor house (1793), The wanderings of Warwick (1794), The banished man (1794), Montalbert (1795), Marchmont (1796), and The young philosopher (1798). It is interesting to note that Emmeline was published in French under a different title in the same year, as Emmeline, ou l’orpheline du château, in two issues (Paris: Letellier, and Maestricht: Roux & Compagnie). No precendance seems to have been established, and all versions are equally rare. Frank 421; Rochedieu p. 305 (Maestricht edition only); see Garside, Raven & Schowerling 1788.72. OCLC records no copies outside of Europe of this edition, and two in North America of the Buisson issue, at Harvard and Alberta." (Pickering & Chatto, cat. 799, lot 80). COPAC lists copies of all three 1788 French editions: copies of the Buisson issue at Univ's Bristol and Oxford, of the Maestricht issue at the BL, and the Letellier issue at the BL, NLS, NLW, TCD, UCL, Wellcome, and Univ's Birmingham, Bradford, Cardiff, Durham, East Anglia, Edinburgh, Lancaster, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Northumbria, Nottingham, St Andrews, Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam, Strathclyde and York, although some are almost certainly external digital copies.

Emmeline Mowbray is an illegitimate orphan who has been allowed by her uncle to use her father’s name and live in his castle in Wales. When her uncle and her cousin, Delamere, visit the castle, everything changes for young Emmeline. Delamere becomes obsessed with her and places her in physical danger. Instead of restraining his son, Emmeline’s uncle keeps forcing her to move. She makes friends wherever she goes, but the threat of Delamere’s violence continues to hang over her and limits her choices of companions and activities. Emmeline and her acquaintances are members of the class that doesn’t work, and since they have nothing better to do, they worry about who might say what to whom, and how others will react to that, and work themselves up into highly emotional states. The book is interesting as a specimen of the literature of its time, but readers shouldn’t expect writing of Austen’s caliber. ( )

A fascinating book, written when the 'women's novel', as satirised in Northanger Abbey, was a mix of moral tract (where the good are good and the bad are bad, and the consequences are mostly just in the end); romantic novel (swooning, duelling and beautiful countryside) and - just - character driven plot. It helps to have a taste for novels where the heroine has ' the compassion as well as the beauty of an angel', but as with many of the novels written in the 18th century by heroic women facing extraordinarily difficult lives, Smith offers a fairy tale plot, with some very painful interludes.