"This exceptional edition of Desmond is a windfall for all who are interested in the incendiary world of late eighteenth-century England." -- Denise Gigante, Stanford University

Desmond is a political novel about the French Revolution. It is Charlotte Smith's only epistolary work, and it is her most politically radical piece. Written in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Smith's Desmond fuses political discussion with romance, social satire and a suspenseful plot revolving around a liberal hero desperately in love with a woman who is married to a drunken anti-revolutionary.