ABSTRACT
Charlotte Smith's biographer Loraine Fletcher has identified The Old Manor House as a key text pioneering the metaphorical use of the manor house to reflect socio-political relationships and trends in society, a metaphor subsequently adapted by later novelists. Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space utilizes as its key figure the house and the different parts and elements of a home as the basis of a structural and metaphorical analysis of how space is depicted in fiction. The paradigm parallels the domestic imagery that Smith utilizes in portraying the domestic environment of The Old Manor House. Although there are places where the details of The Old Manor House fail to mesh with Bachelard's overall paradigm, examining the parallels may still illuminate key traits at the heart of the sentimental novel. One element of the oneiric imagery of "house" that Bachelard explores on a broad level in The Poetics of Space is the "dialectics of outside and inside.".
