Jonty Claypole

So she's the kind of servant's ward and she's tolerated in the house as long as she's never seen.

Now, Orlando makes the great mistake of falling in love with Monomia.

And as a consequence, partly because of this, he is disinherited or he is not named as heir of the Ryland estate.

And the second half of the book, he ends up bizarrely going to America, fighting on the royalist side of the American War of Independence.

He is captured by Native Americans, badly wounded.

And the last part of the novel, which is where it becomes completely gripping, it's like Leonardo DiCaprio and The Revenant, is he's struggling to get home.

All he wants to do is to get back to Monomaya and he's happy to live in poverty if that's what it takes.

Now, what Charlotte Smith does in this book, which is so significant, is that, as you'll have noticed, the title of the book is not Monomier.

It is The Old Manor House.

And what Charlotte Smith is doing is in a kind of proto or sort of pre-Marxist way, the book is really about how the country estates work and the kind of feudal economy that they have in there.

So neither Orlando nor Monomier are kind of central parts of the family.

They're both outliers.

And their relationship with the Hall, with Ryland Hall, and Charlotte Smith is doing this for the first time, but it becomes the absolute central trope of so many of Jane Austen's novels that...

The characters like Fanny Price and Lizzie Bennet, they are kind of tolerated as sort of guests at these big estates.

But they themselves are kind of, they're outcasts or they're disinherited.

And that is what Jane Austen gets from Charlotte Smith, decided that the kind of life of an estate, that the hierarchy around estates is,

can be an extraordinary plot device for how you position your characters and your love interests and bring them together.

We see the influence of Charlotte Smith and this book very clearly in all of Jane Austen's novels, but particularly in two.

First of all, Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey.

So as we talked about in our Northanger Abbey episode, when Catherine Morland goes as a sort of semi-welcome guest to Northanger Abbey,