Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake

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Description

Ethelinde Chesterville has no fortune and no real protector, only a fierce sense of what she owes to her own conscience. That leaves her exposed on every side: to a guardian's wealthy, unhappily married brother who falls in love with her against his better judgment, and to Montgomery, a young man of no fortune at all, whom she loves in return but cannot in honor encourage. Charlotte Smith sends her heroine from the drawing rooms of London to the shores of Grasmere in the English Lake District — rendered here in some of the earliest extended, loving descriptions of that landscape to appear in a popular novel, years before the Lake Poets made the region famous — and lets the mountains and still water mirror a heart divided between duty and desire.

Published in 1789, Ethelinde was one of the biggest novel successes of its decade, read and admired by nearly every major novelist who came after Smith, including Jane Austen. It helped establish the landscape-driven sensibility that Wordsworth and the Romantic poets would later claim as their own, yet Smith's own novels vanished from print for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This Nile Book Store edition restores the complete, unabridged text of all five volumes, including Smith's own dedication to the Duchess of Cumberland.

Author & Genre

Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) was a poet and novelist who wrote to support ten children after her husband's imprisonment for debt, and whose work shaped the writers of the Romantic generation that followed her. Genre: Sentimental Fiction / Romance.

"After the weakness I have betrayed, it were in vain to attempt concealing from you the fatal prepossession which prudence, reason, and duty equally forbid me to indulge. Since our parting is inevitable, why should we lengthen its pain; and I do intreat you to spare me the repetition of a scene to which I own myself altogether unequal."