ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shows that even a novel as late and 'experimental' as Mansfield Park nonetheless has its genesis, like Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey, in the 1790s, and particularly in Charlotte Smith's next-but-one novel to Celestina, The Old Manor House. Smith has been noted in connection with Austen at least since Mary Lascelles's Jane Austen and her Art; for Lascelles, Smith's Emmeline provides an ironic reversal of type for Austen's Catherine Morland. The Smithian contours of Mansfield Park, in other words, allow Austen's novel to contemplate the seductions of genre the seductive ploys of its characters. In adapting Smith, Austen inherits her 1790s radicalism and also her moral strictures; her world of seduction is simultaneously the more permissive one of the Regency and the more restrained one of a culture used to war and privation. One of the biggest near-seductions in The Old Manor House takes place between Orlando Somerive and the quasi-servant Monimia.
