To hear Charlotte Smith talk about her writing, you would think she was a drudge or even a hack, ‘compelled’, as she now famously put it, ‘to live only to write & write only to live’. Her letters to publishers are long on publishing detail – how many sheets to a volume; how many volumes to a novel; how much she would be paid for each – and not just short, but wholly lacking, in any claim to art. Except that she is continually ordering or borrowing books from them, she seems to have her nose to a grindstone and her eyes shut to all literary value. Only occasionally, most conspicuously in her letters to her Dublin friend, Rev. Joseph Cooper Walker, who selflessly oversaw her fortunes in Ireland, and in those late, wonderfully animated letters to Sarah Rose, does her sense of literary merit show through. There, indeed, one suddenly discovers someone who is reading every principal piece of literature available and commenting sharply upon the success or lack thereof of many contemporary productions. She complains to Walker of Edgeworth's Belinda that ‘the harshness & rude manner of the execution is unpleasing’ and to Mrs Rose that she ‘thought [Godwin 's] Fleetwood very la la – not to say a disagreeable Novel … Men very seldom write pleasing novel s’. To an unknown correspondent on New Year's Day of 1805 she wryly remarks that for her friend Godwin, ‘Novel writing is not his forte but his foible’. Frequently, as in this same letter, she notes archly how badly written and derivative much of the current literary production is. Here, then, is a person with a highly developed sense of taste who in her occasional foray into literary criticism meticulously distinguishes the styles and trends in contemporary literature. Still, we do not look in her correspondence for an extensive critique of other writers or for an analytical account of her own processes and aims as a writer. The kind of self-reflection of a Keats or a Byron is, unfortunately, foreign to the nature of her correspondence.