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“Shallow” Estates and the “Deep” Wild: The Landscapes of Charlotte Smith’s Fiction

This essay argues that poet and novelist Charlotte Smith pioneered an innovative, antihegemonic mode of locodescription that resists Romantic-era narratives of progress. In her fiction, Smith invests topography with a sense of depth that challenges other Romantic representations of nature, especially those that celebrate the panoramic view and its putative comprehensiveness. Celestina (1791) and The Old Manor House (1793) expose idealized images of rural England as false; the “deep” landscapes found in these novels work to uncover the class and gender biases of the prospect view and, more broadly, to resist elitist narratives that inhered in images of the “green and pleasant” countryside.