highlights the disjunction between the fantasy and the 18th-century reality that women without property had little worth in English society. Autobiography Through the Staffords, Smith draws a picture of her marriage. Throughout her career, beginning with Elegiac Sonnets (1784), Smith represented her own personal struggles in her works. In the Staffords, she showed a "responsible wife and devoted mother, who attempts to avert her husband's disgrace". In a direct parallel to Smith's own life, Mrs. Stafford must deal with her husband's creditors after which the family flees to France. Adelina also resembles elements of Smith's history, particularly the unhappy marriage that is forced on her early in life by her family. In Emmeline Smith begins a pattern of using secondary heroines to tell her story. Readers who knew her story, which she made public, could identify with her personally. As Fletcher explains, "she shrewdly promoted her career, gained sympathy for her problems as a single mother and turned herself into a celebrity through self-revelation." Initially readers found this technique fascinating and persuasive, but over the years, they came to agree with poet Anna Seward:"I have always been told that Mrs. Smith designed, nay that she acknowledges, the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Stafford to be drawn for herself and her husband. Whatever may be Mr. Smith's faults, surely it was as wrong as indelicate, to hold up the man, whose name she bears, the father of her children, to public contempt in a novel." Duelling Smith explores femininity through her portrayal of marriage of property and masculinity through duelling. She compares and contrasts different forms of duelling through five different male characters. Mr. Elkerton is terrified of fighting in a duel; he remains part of the commercial class, failing to achieve the respectability of a gentleman. The elder Croft brother, also part of the commercial class, fails to challenge his wife's lover to a duel. In these characters, Smith demonstrates her "contempt for the commercial class". However, she also criticises "aristocratic recklessnes and self-indulgence" in the characters of Delamere and de Bellozane—both fight duels intending to kill their opponents. It is the hero Godolphin who navigates a middle way. He threatens a duel but is dissuaded from carrying it out by the women in the story. Genre Eighteenth-century novel Smith's novel comments on the development of the genre during the 18th century. For example, usually the heroine marries the first