Celestina (novel)

Published in 1791 by Thomas Cadell, the novel tells the story of an adopted orphan who discovers the secret of her parentage and marries the man she loves.

While Celestina is a heroine of sensibility who relies on her feelings to develop sympathy for others, it is the hero, Willoughby, who is the most sentimental of all, reversing the stereotypical association of strong emotions with femininity.

Readers were interested in her personal story and bought her works to discover what was happening in her life, therefore she included barely disguised autobiographical details in the novel.

Mrs. Willoughby dies early in the novel, urging George to marry her brother's (Lord Castlenorth) daughter, Miss Fitz-Hayman, so that the family estate can be saved from financial ruin.

When Willougby travels to France to tell his uncle that he is no longer marrying Miss Fitz-Hayman, he discovers the secret of Celestina's birth when he stays with some peasants.

During the 18th century, the courtship novel allowed authors to comment on a wide range of social topics, including economics, gender roles, and politics.

[4] Smith's first three novels—Emmeline (1788), Ethelinde (1789), and Celestina—follow this pattern but also contain unique elements; as Loraine Fletcher explains in her introduction to the Broadview Press edition of Celestina, all three have "self-possessed, reflective heroines, conflicting family relationships, acerbic radical satire, acceptance that marriage is a woman's goal but that great caution is necessary in achieving it, a more tolerant attitude to extramarital sex and the 'fallen' woman than is usually found in English novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, threatening castles emblematic of gender and national hierarchies, and contrasting locations including sublime mountains landscape".

[5] Beginning with her Elegiac Sonnets in 1784, Smith included autobiographical material in her works, relaying "a saga of her own marital unhappiness, poverty and anxiety about her children".

For example, Sophy's marriage to a merchant whose wealth was built on the slave trade, her suffering as a mother, and the loss of her children, all parallel Smith's own life.

[8] Celestina takes a trip to the Hebrides where she writes poetry and watches her friend's husband die in a shipwreck, mimicking an illustration Thomas Stothard made for the fifth edition of the Sonnets.

She felt, that in point of intellect she was superior to almost every body she conversed with; she could not look into the glass without seeing the reflection of a form, worthy of so fair an inhabitant as an enlightened human soul.

Relying on the new idea of Enlightenment, found in the works of authors such as Rousseau and Voltaire, Smith "asserts the value of the small individual life and its rights to the pursuit of happiness".

As Fletcher explains, "Smith's feminine model is as independent as possible for an unmarried young woman in the middle or upper class who wished to remain socially acceptable".

Fletcher notes that "the party scenes are so similar it is fair to assume that Austen initially intended a recognisable critique of Smith's [novel]".

Written as the Revolution Controversy was unfolding and begun five weeks after the storming of the Bastille, the novel reveals the tyranny of the ancien regime through Celestina's backstory.

Cadell had become her friend and mentor, but he was averse to the radical views expressed in her works and refused to publish her next two novels, Desmond (1792) and The Old Manor House (1793).

[23] The reviewer for the European Magazine wrote that "if to delight the imagination by correct and brilliant descriptions of picturesque scenery, and to awaken the finest sympathies of the heart by well-formed representations of soft distress, be a test of excellence in novel-writing, the pen of Mrs. Smith unquestionably deserves the warmest praise.