Emmeline - Composition

Composition

Smith and her husband had a tumultuous relationship and in April 1787, after twenty-two years of marriage, she left him. She wrote that she might “have been contented to reside in the same house with him”, had not “his temper been so capricious and often so cruel” that her “life was not safe”. Her father-in-law had settled money on her children and she expected to receive the money within a year of the separation, thinking she would have to support her children for only a year or so. She never received the money during her lifetime, however, and was forced to write until her death in 1806. In order to support her ten living children, she had to produce many works and quickly. She wrote almost every day and once works were sent to the printer, they were rarely revised or corrected. Lorraine Fletcher notes in her introduction to the Broadview Press of Emmeline, "there were times when she did not know how a novel would finish even when she was well into the last volume", however outright errors were "rare".