The Old Manor House (World's Classics) [Paperback]

Charlotte Turner Smith (Author), Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (Author, Editor)

Book Description

Series: World's Classics | Publication Date: April 13, 1989

This is a sentimental romance with a Gothic setting, written in 1793 by Charlotte Smith, a poet and novelist who wrote to support her eight children. It is a complex story concerning Orlando, a second son, who must enter the military service for a living while his older brother wastes the family's small fortune. Orlando has a slight hope of an inheritance from a distant relative, the last owner of the Manor House, whose sinister housekeeper maintains her orphaned niece, one of Orlando's childhood friends. Around these two disinherited young people there is woven a plot of midnight meetings in a haunted house, banquets, smugglers, elopements, a missing will and the hero's adventures overseas during the American war of Independence. The novel attacks the injustice of the English inheritance system of the 1770s and the evils of war and slavery.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Labbe's celebratory introduction to The Old Manor House emphasizes Charlotte Smith's literary modernity; the notes and appendices amplify Smith's references to property law, revolutionary politics, and warfare. By implication, Smith's novel is revealed as an extension of—rather than a mere reflection of—the contemporaneous debates that are so well represented in the scholarly apparatus. This is another excellent Broadview edition." (Angela Keane )

"Masquerading as a romance set in the 1770s, The Old Manor House satirizes characters who invoke feudal codes to mark the despotic authority of property over those who lack it but can imagine no other mode of genteel existence. Jacqueline Labbe's new edition creates a valuable array of supplementary documents for reading the subtle politics of this novel and its negotiations with the terms of fictional romance." (Theresa M. Kelley ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

In The Old Manor House (1794), Charlotte Smith combines elements of the romance, the Gothic, recent history, and culture to produce both a social document and a compelling novel. A "property romance," the love story of Orlando and Monimia revolves around the Manor House as inheritable property. In situating their romance as dependent on the whims of property owners, Smith critiques a society in love with money at the expense of its most vulnerable members, the dispossessed. Appendices in this edition include: contemporary responses; writings on the genre debate by Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Moore, and Walter Scott; and historical documents focusing on property laws as well as the American and French revolutions. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (April 13, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192822020
• ISBN-13: 978-0192822024
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,611,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A massive epic-scale novel set during the American Revolution, in both England and America., April 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Old Manor House (World's Classics) (Paperback)

This book is designed to create a bleak,desolate tone (a la Wuthering Heights), and it does so by describing the heroine's graduallyincreasing suffering and oppression. The novel, like so many of Arthur Conan Doyle's SherlockHomes stories, exposes the vices that can flourish in the lonely, isolated British manor. The hero'ssufferings come as a blast of fresh air and relief in the novel: Orlando goes to fight on the Britishside in the American revolution and ends up wounded with several Indians in a rather inaccuratelydescribed American landscape. There is a sort of sequel, The Wanderings of Warwick, which tells what happens to two of the characters who disappear for a huge portion of the novel. The heroine is rather pathetic for a good deal of the novel, but she gets a burst of feminist courage at the end of the novel as she sets out on her own and finds a job.