Thrown by misfortune from the bosom of my country, I early learned to be a Citizen of the World.-In what obscure corner of it… shall I ever find a quiet asylum? Charlotte Smith, Marchmont (1796) French émigrés arriving on Britain's shores in the 1790s inspired an impressive range of literary works, theatrical productions, and charitable drives, energizing British Romanticism's cosmopolitanism in the face of an intensifying nationalism. Utopian emigration and exile often feature in traditional accounts of male canonical Romanticism, and despite the ubiquitous figure of the female exile or émigrée in the poetry of the 1790s, literary scholars have largely neglected the specific dimensions of the French émigré phenomenon for British Romanticism. Recent scholarly interest in cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and critical global studies across disciplinary boundaries has reshaped the national and linguistic contours of "British" Romanticism, however, along comparative lines. It is within such a specifically cosmopolitan framework that I wish to consider how the émigrés helped shape the cosmopolitanism of British Romanticism, and in particular of Charlotte Smith. The émigrés allow us to chart a distinctly antinationalist and cosmopolitan Romantic response to the French Revolution, one particularly resonant in women's writings because of British women's shared disenfranchisement with other groups like the émigrés. Émigré novels also pose an important challenge to the association of novel and nation so popular in recent scholarship. Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel in particular establishes the British novel at the turn of the nineteenth century as the "new symbolic form" uniquely able to represent and reinforce an emerging sense of nationalism (17). Jane Austen is his paradigmatic novelist, of course, and through her vision of England, Moretti concludes that "the novel is truly the symbolic form of
