The image of the manor house in Sofia Engelhardt’s short novel Two housewarmings

The article deals with the work of Sofia Engelhardt, a nineteenth-century female fiction prose writer. The significance of this study stems from the growing interest among researchers in women’s prose, including the exploration of “forgotten” authors associated with this genre. Contemporary scholars view women’s prose as a distinct gendered phenomenon, characterized by a unique perspective that sets it apart from male-authored works. However, discussions of Engelhardt’s writings tend to be superficial or occur primarily in relation to more celebrated authors such as Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Alexander Ostrovsky. Our analysis focuses on the short novel Two Housewarmings written in the 1860s. The aim of this study is to examine the story through the main structural elements of artistic composition: narration, plot, conflict, characters, chronotope, and genre. The novelty of our research is the recognition that the manor house has not previously been the subject of in-depth analysis within the realm of women’s prose. We conclude that Two Housewarmings fits within the genre of the so-called “manor house short novel”, which was widely prevalent in the nineteenth-century Russian prose.