3 - Declarations of Independence in The Old Manor House

Summary

Charlotte Smith's fifth novel, The Old Manor House was published in 1793, and won Smith back some friends after the critical and political fallout from Desmond. While the Analytical Review and the Critical Review criticized the novel's improbabilities of plot, its cluttered and circuitous narrative and its lack of moral decorum, the novel gradually accumulated readers and critical support.

Contemporary critics have defended the novel 's apparent formal inconsistencies by drawing attention to Smith's playfulness with the romance genre and her ability to match form to content. Jacqueline Labbe, for instance, argues that the shift in narrative pace after the first volume, which perplexed and alienated some early reviewers, can be accounted for by the accelerated pace of events in the life of the protagonist, Orlando Somerive. The ‘leisured’ first volume, she writes, ‘explores the relaxed setting of Orlando's youth’ while the style of the subsequent volumes reflects the more complicated and rushed nature of his life (TOMH, 13). Joseph Bartolomeo has drawn attention to Smith's ‘parodic self-consciousness about the conventions of romance as they operate in the novel’, defending The Old Manor House both from early critics who questioned the probability of some narrative developments and from some late twentieth-century feminist critics who regarded the novel as conservative in sexual politics, conforming to ‘the standards of the sentimental love story or the extravagant romance’. Labbe and Bartolomeo agree that Smith's representation of Orlando Somerive is often critical and throws into question the status of the novel 's central love plot and the novel 's relationship to the genre of romance. This critical distance from Orlando, Labbe and Bartolomeo suggest, creates an ironic frame for the novel's denouement in which the woman and the property from which the ‘hero’ is separated for much of the novel are restored, or rather, granted to him. We are asked to question rather than revel in Orlando's successes. I would agree with Labbe and Bartolomeo that Orlando Somerive is an ambiguous romance hero. However, I see his failed heroism less as a critical response to the genre of romance than as a continuation of Smith's critique of the British public sphere and British masculinity.