LORAINE FLETCHER is a Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Reading. She was born in Somerset, grew up on Friday Hill Council Estate in Chingford and went to Woodford County High School and Reading University. She has taught all her adult life in schools, at evening classes as a private tutor, at Stanford University's base in England and currently in the English Department at Reading University. She has lived in America for over eleven years at various times and places from the sixties to the eighties. She took her MA at Arizona State University and her PhD at Birkbeck. She is the widow of the poet and 1890s scholar Ian Fletcher, has two daughters and lives in Reading.

• Acknowledgements Introduction Exile Writing to Live Girondism An Interest in Green Leaves The Goddess of Botany Jane Austen Beachy Head Charlotte Smith's Works in Chronological Order Editions of Charlotte Smith's Works Cited Primary Sources Secondary Sources

'Fletcher's biography is as compulsive as any novel, and it makes the reader simply long to read, and experience the redoubtable Mrs Smith at first hand.' - Kate Saunders, New Statesman '...a substantial contribution to studies of women in the 'Romantic' period, lively in its detail, wide-ranging in its argument; seeing Smith as a significant judge of her own turbulent times, and as an influence on her literary successors.' - Times Literary Supplement 'two aspects from a biography in which there is so much to praise. An undisguised partiality wafts from the pages like a breath of fresh air amid the stuffiness of academia. Second, Fletcher's analyses of the novels are some of the most valuable pieces of criticism ever written on Smith.' - Paul Jarman, The Independent