Tropes of Exile in the 1790s: English Women Writers and French Emigrants

Abstract

The following essay deals with a neglected aspect of the works of Frances Burney and Charlotte Smith—the fact that many of their novels, poems and pamphlets written during the 1790s revolve around the issue of French emigration. It will be shown that novels like The Banished Man or The Wanderer or, Female Difficulties as well as Smith's long poem The Emigrants or Burney's pamphlet “Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy” do not only analyze the French emigrants' fate meticulously, but also adopt tropes of exile, homelessness and wandering to depict the situation of women in late eighteenth‐century English society. More often than not the trope of exile is used in these texts as a strategy to imagine communities, i.e., to partake in the political project of outlining reformed models of society. On the basis of a detailed analysis of the texture, implications and success of the metaphors of homelessness and exile and a comparison of the literary strategies chosen by Burney and Smith respectively, the essay will judge the potential of these two female authors' emigrant‐texts to envision a society which changes “things as they are.”