Smith became involved with English radicals while living in Brighton from 1791 to 1793. Like them, she supported the French Revolution and its republican principles. Her epistolary novel "Desmond" tells of a man journeying to revolutionary France and convinced of the rightness of the revolution. He contends that England should be reformed as well. The novel was published in June 1792, a year before France and Britain went to war and before the Reign of Terror began, which shocked the British public, turning them against the revolutionaries. Like many radicals, Smith criticised the French, but still endorsed the original ideals of the revolution. To support her family, Smith had to sell her works, and so was eventually forced, as Blank claims, to "tone down the radicalism that had characterised the authorial voice in "Desmond" and adopt more oblique techniques to express her libertarian ideals". She set her next novel, "The Old Manor House" (1793), during the American War of Independence, which allowed her to discuss democratic reform without directly addressing the French situation. However, in her last novel, "The Young Philosopher" (1798), Smith wrote a final piece of "outspoken radical fiction". Her protagonist leaves Britain for America, as there is no hope for reform in Britain.