'Sold, a legal prostitute' when married off at the age of fifteen, Charlotte Smith left her wastrel husband to support herself and their children as a poet and novelist who would have a lasting influence on William Wordsworth and Jane Austen. Combative and witty she became a radical, controversial and very popular author: at a time when the French Revolution was raising high hopes of Reform, she argued for change in England too. Loraine Fletcher's vivid scholarly biography is as readable for the newcomer to the 1790s as for the specialist, tracing the embattled life in the wonderfully self-dramatising fiction.