Dear Friends and readers,
Valancourt Press has published my edition of Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake. You can see the book, a description of the story, and places and ways to buy at Valancourt’s on-line site. The artist who painted that alluring suggestive image on the cover is Jean-Baptiste Mallet (1759-1835). This is the first scholarly paperback edition. It took me 5 years (on and off) to type, proof-read, annotate and introduce the novel. 136 notes at the bottom of appropriate pages. A select bibliography, and note on the text.
I would describe the novel’s central story differently. Smith’s Ethelinde is centered on a depiction of adulterous love more sympathetic and true to experience on both the novel’s hero, Sir Edward Newenden and his once loved wife, Maria. It is the story of Newenden’s gradual falling in love with Ethelinde Chesterville, the novel’s primary heroine, his physical as well as emotional need for her in the face of his wife’s increasing distaste for him, for his idealistic and ethical values, and for his children; and in the face of her love for the novel’s secondary younger hero, Charles Montgomery. we trace his efforts to repress his longing for the congenial sensitive readerly Ethelinde; and experience the final thwarting of his intensely compelling and sexual desire for Ethelinde. Delayed until the middle of the first volume of the novel and then told as tales within a tale, we have the stories of Mrs Caroline Montgomery, the widowed recluse of the lake, and mother of Charles Montgomery, whom Ethelinde falls in love with, together with a parallel deep past story of Mrs Montgomery’s unnamed mother, who after she was widowed and impoverished, lived happily with a man she was not married to and had two sons by. There are other inset histories about women driven by economic, social, and legal constraints as well as threatened violence to live with men outside marriage. And in the present tense, the story of Charles Montgomery’s failed attempt to secure patronage for a high-paying position, Ethelinde’s father and brother’s accumulation of debt from gambling and extraordinary socializing; Sir Edward’s sister, Ellen, her horsewomanship and rescue from predatory males seeking marriage to control her estate. Houses are symbolic sites: Ludford House for bitter commercialism; the haunted gothicized Abersley, in Worcestershire; the Montgomery cottage and Grasmere Abbey in Cumbria where the novel begins; before the novel ends numbers of our characters have traveled across the globe.
The Recluse of the Lake is not as dominated by landscapes as people sometimes suggest; but what is there is strong, frequent enough, and unforgettable. It was quickly translated into French and there the landscape passages are particularly felicitious too. Charlotte Smith was a great poet.
You can buy it at Amazon.US too: available at Valancourt as a kindle, ebook, and trade paperback. A friend said a notice on Amazon.UK says it will be available as of November 1st.
I think back to those weeks & weeks in the early 1980s in the Rare Book room and in the microfilm and microfiche reading room of the Library of Congress: was spending time reading Charlotte Smith’s poems, and two of her novels. Realizing how little of Smith was in print then, I could not have daydreamed that someday I could be responsible for bringing one of the few (at this point) of Smith’s fine novels not yet back into print in 2016.
I’ve traveled a long way from my days and nights at the Library of Congress. I go to conferences, live and research a lot on the Net, teach literature in non-traditional programs.
I wish Jim had lived to appreciate all this, to see this book made of Smith’s novel and my apparatus, congratulate and gently tease me, and praise the whole performance that is this edition of Ethelinde.
“Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! She chortled in her joy!”
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Quoting:
“wish Jim had lived to appreciate this, to see this book, congratulate and gently tease me, praise the whole performance that is this edition of Ethelinde.
“Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! She chortled in her joy!”
Even in joy there’s a little sadness, but so glad for your joy. Congratulations!
Jane”
Me: “Yes this event is also sad — as are all events for me. My Jim died October 9th, 2013 in my arms. I held him and talked to him to the tast moment, I felt his heart stop. It’s another irony that this week where I first met him, married him, and now he died, is also the week this second book was published.
I have “appeared” in good essays in about 4 volumes thus far that I can think of (Austenland in the title, Italian book of essays; two collections on film adaptations where I write about Trollope films), I’ve typed, edited, annotated, introduced, provided bibliographies for two later 18th century novels by women, both epistolary, put them on-line, and they have been favorably reviwed, used by classes; a third text of an unfinished 17th autobiography by a Scots-English woman, Anne Murray Halkett where I kept the original spelling) and once wrote the introduction for an edition of one of the Northanger Abbey novels for Valancourt, but this is the second full traditionally published book.”
Ellen
Robert Burke: ” Isn’t this the second Valancourt book you edited? I already ordered this book.
Me: Thank you for asking. No, it’s not. What happened was he apparently had an editor for The Orphan of the Rhine by Eleanor Sleath, for the text when he gave me it was fully typed and proofed. There is no checking it against other texts, for these is no manuscript, and I’m not sure a contemporary copy exists. The run seems to have been read to pieces. But then I did research, write an introduction and select bibliography. I offered to do notes but he said not necessary (perhaps it is not an important enough book). The edition was reviewed in TLS and my introduction was singled out as very good.
if i didn’t dread the work (time), and think perhaps it is getting too expensive for Valancourt to produce later 18th century texts even by a great minor writer and poet, I’d propose Smith’s Marchmont. It is now the only one of her good novels where there is no affordable single paperback, much less a scholarly annotated one.
Dodo Press has simply reprinted The Banished Man and a firm which reprints the tiny pages from ECCO four to a page has reprinted Montalbert— so you can get them. from used bookstores, online. But not Marchmont — which is powerful and has superb long sequences on war in Europe during the allies siegge on France, siege on a border town and life in a debtor’s prison. It has a sensible Austen-like Austen too.
Congratulations again, Ellen. After reading the description, I’m more eager than ever to read the novel. A tale of adultery. How daring! I wish you much success with the book.
Tyler Tichelaar
Well longed-for adultery. Poor Sir Edward longs for it. Maria does commit adultery with Lord Danesforte, but it’s off -stage as is her death. Smith has numbers of women who have children out of wedlock who are partial heroines; she was attacked for giving some of them happy endings. She has another rarity: in the Solitary Wanderer there is a depiction of childbirth (discreet but there) and wife abuse in bed (ditto).
Well, I’m no fan of adultery, but it sounds like a fascinating and truly daring novel.
Well Smith does not go far enough in her depiction because she’s a woman: but the idea is coerced and arranged marriages end up in adulteries. Sir Edward never does, but his longing for a loving companion is vindicated. Maria is punished for deserting her children.
Omar F. Miranda:
“Congratulations. This is wonderful news.
Thank you. Now others can read this book over and over and it will at long last re-enter the discourse of romanticism. Ellen