The Old Manor House

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Description

Orlando Somerive loves Monimia, the penniless, half-imprisoned niece kept almost as a servant by his family's formidable old kinswoman, Mrs. Rayland, mistress of a crumbling, ivy-covered manor house full of locked rooms and forbidden passages. What begins as a story of secret staircases and stolen meetings by candlelight widens dramatically: Orlando is sent to fight in the American War of Independence, and returns to find the fate of the estate — and of Monimia — hanging on an inheritance no one expected. Charlotte Smith builds her Gothic romance into something sturdier: a novel about who really owns an old house, and what is owed to the people the world has decided not to see.

Published in 1793, The Old Manor House is widely considered Smith's finest novel — Sir Walter Scott praised it as one of the best of its class, and it helped shape the Gothic fiction that Ann Radcliffe and later writers would make famous. Despite this reputation, it fell out of print for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and remains known today mainly to specialists. This Nile Book Store edition restores the complete, unabridged text of all four volumes. A free public-domain audiobook recording of this novel is also available from LibriVox for listeners who'd like to pair the two.

Author & Genre

Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) was a poet and novelist who wrote to support ten children after her husband's imprisonment for debt, and whose work shaped the Romantic-era writers who followed her, including Jane Austen and William Wordsworth. Genre: Gothic Fiction / Sentimental Novel.

"Orlando, possessing this secret, flattered himself that his very extraordinary acquaintance would keep his word, and that the communication between the study and the apartment of Monimia might once more be open, without making her liable to those terrors from which she had suffered so much."