ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the English writers such as Charlotte Turner Smith's novel constructs a complex image of Britain's lingering political and social anxieties over the American War while at the same time discovering its effects within the very heart of Britain itself. Bearing in mind the novel's conspicuous attention to such realism, the chapter argues that Smith's depiction of transatlantic warfare complicates the self- proclaimed nobility of the British imperial project by projecting a nostalgic, even elegiac, image of national domesticity against the contagion and disorder wrought by Britain's involvement in the American War of Independence. In The Old Manor House's rendering of America, then, Smith wields a trope of significant power, one capable of displaying fully the impact of war on the collective imagination wherein the pitiable effects of imperial and military violence are discovered within the very confines of Britain itself.
