Amanda Root as Anne Elliot walking among the autumn leaves (1995 BBC Persuasion, scripted Nick Dear, directed Roger Michell)
Dear friends and readers,
I am chuffed (proud, happy) to say two new essays on Charlotte Smith by me are now available from the power and liberty of the Internet. The first is my essay for Sarah Emsley’s new series of blogs, “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” due to start December 16th. Mine is one of two previews;
“For there is nothing lost that may be found: Charlotte Smith in Jane Austen’s Persuasion”
The other is by William Hutchings, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK, “A Sense of An Ending: Persuasion and Keats’s “Ode to Autumn.”
It will be seen both of us chose to dwell on the autumnal aspects of Austen’s Persuasion and how she uses or provides an analogy for autumnal poetry by two contemporary or near contemporary poets. Thus Sarah put ours on her blog before Austen’s birthday in order to be seasonally on time.
I am writing this separate linked-in blog since I want to make sure there is no misapprehension about the four years worth of blogs on this site about Jane Austen’s letters and the Austen papers. The blogs came out of a group read we did on the two Austen lists (Austen-l and Janeites) several years. It was my idea to do the letters slowly, one a week. However, what insights emerged were a “hive” effect, the result of all of us putting our collective heads together to close read and add our own bits of knowledge and insight—and sometimes clashing on who Austen was as a person. It was a wonderful experience.
The second is on Charlotte Smith in a different or wider vein: I’ve decided to put my paper on “The Global Charlotte Smith: migrancy and women in Ethelinde and The Emigrants on academia.edu where it may be read now. It is also timely in a different way: for its political perspective on women and emigration.
A photograph taken in Oxford, Wytham Woods this November 19, 2017 by a friend
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
For my other many essays on Charlotte Smith, blogs on all sorts of topic, here is a single link:
https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/tag/charlotte-smith/
Just for the six on the recent Charlotte Smith conference at Chawton House:
https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/placing-charlotte-smith-at-chawton-house-library-desmond-beachy-head-a-musical-lecture-recital-st-johns-guildford/
And finally the paper I gave there: A Peculiar Kind of Woman’s Text ….
which partly came out of my study of Scottish women’s poetry contemporary with Smith and Austen: Austen read the memoirs and letters of one of the two, Anna MacVicar Grant. Anne Home Hunter is the other.
https://www.academia.edu/18549167/Anne_Home_Hunter_and_Anne_Macvicar_Grant_Poetry_and_Prose_from_the_Center_and_the_Peripheries
This is just to say that I read Ellen’s article and found it very interesting. If I had not already read Smith’s Ethelinde, this article would have convinced me to read it. It is a fascinating novel and I encourage everyone to read it who hasn’t yet. The colonialism theme in Ellen’s paper draws out many of the concerns here that Smith had and I also learned a lot about Smith’s other novels that I haven’t yet read. I am really surprised how ahead of her time she was – a true precursor to Radcliffe and the Romantics and Austen – a lost voice that Ellen is successfully reclaiming for us.
Tyler Tichelaar
Thanks again for your wonderful contribution to my new blog series, Ellen!
[…] there is nothing lost, that may not be found: Charlotte Smith in Austen’s Autumnal Persuasion“ (today this essay was published by Sarah Emsley as one of two previews of a coming series of […]
This is just to say that I read Ellen’s article and found it very interesting. If I had not already read Smith’s Ethelinde, this article would have convinced me to read it. It is a fascinating novel and I encourage everyone to read it who hasn’t yet. The colonialism theme in Ellen’s paper draws out many of the concerns here that Smith had and I also learned a lot about Smith’s other novels that I haven’t yet read. I am really surprised how ahead of her time she was – a true precursor to Radcliffe and the Romantics and Austen – a lost voice that Ellen is successfully reclaiming for us.
Tyler Tichelaar
[…] human experience of profound loss in Austen’s Persuasion. Pervasively and across the novel Austen alludes to Charlotte Smith’s plangent and despairing poetry of loss, embedding the novel as well in the romantic poetry of Byron and Scott. Arguably the crippled, […]