Desmond
by Charlotte Smith
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Description
Desmondis a political novel about the French Revolution. It is Charlotte Smith's only epistolary work, and it is her most politically radical piece. Written in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolutionin France, Smith's Desmond fuses political discussion with romance, social satire and a suspenseful plot revolving 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 show more 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. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Thank the dickens I've finally finished this novel. I know I'll be called a farce of a scholar for saying so - but should I ever be required to read such an atrocity again, I will be forced to exclaim that I'd rather stick my head in the tub and drown myself.
This thing is boring from the first page to the last, though if you have a hard-on for the French Revolution, you might at least find parts of it interesting. If that is the case, I give you ALL my pity.
This thing is boring from the first page to the last, though if you have a hard-on for the French Revolution, you might at least find parts of it interesting. If that is the case, I give you ALL my pity.
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Author Information
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Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1792
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 64
- Popularity
- 484,389
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (2.93)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
