Jacqueline M. Labbe is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the University of Warwick

One of several new books to insist on crediting nineteenth-century minds with their due measure of sophistication. Labbe argues persuasively that this magisterial persona actively critiques Smith's own earlier poetic practice as well as her culture's fictions of identity.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Embodying the author1. The possibilities of print2. 'Elegaic Sonnets' I: The good mother3. 'Elegaic Sonnets' II: The woman in need4. On the edge: Politics and the strictures of subjectivity in 'The Emigrants'5. Locating the poet in 'Beachy Head'Coda: Smith, poetry, RomanticismBibliography