"We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?": Reading and writing the romantic hero in "The Old Manor House" and "The Age of Innocence"

Abstract

What does it mean, to “behave like people in novels”? More importantly, what does it mean for a novelist to put this comment in the mouth of one of her characters? Edith Wharton and Charlotte Smith, and their representations of readers and writers, illustrate the personal and social negotiations between romance, the sentimental novel, and realism. Conventionally placed as the reader of romance, rather than writer, the woman novelist explores how this anxiety plays out in the lives of her characters, particularly those characters most sensitive to literature. This study aims to show how the complex negotiations between romance and realism are played out through the figure of the romantic hero in Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. I will suggest that Wharton owes more to romance and the sentimental novel than many critics have recognized, while Smith approaches realism more nearly than her critics have acknowledged. This study hopes to recover the complexity of their work in order to show their profound contributions to the novel form. Both authors perform rich social critique, showing the “real world” of the novel's social norm to be as constructed and as un-real as the hero's fantasies.