Maria Edgeworth

English novelist

• Born: January 1, 1768
• Birthplace: Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, England
• Died: May 22, 1849
• Place of death: Edgeworthstown, Ireland

Edgeworth achieved fame in her own time as a novelist and author of children’s stories, but her lasting impact has been as a regional novelist who captured the lives of landlords and tenants living in Ireland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Early Life

Maria Edgeworth was the third child and first daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his wife, Anna Maria. The Edgeworths were descendants of an English family who had been given land in Ireland during the seventeenth century. The family lived in England until 1782, when Maria’s father moved them to their Irish estate, Edgeworthtown in County Longford.

During Maria’s childhood, her mother died, as did two stepmothers in later decades. Each time that her father lost a wife, he dutifully remarried. His fourth wife, Frances, whom he married in 1798, was a year younger than Maria herself. Edgeworth eventually had a total of twenty-two children by his four wives. As one of the oldest, Maria frequently found herself assisting in rearing younger siblings, an experience that would later influence her writing.

As a child, Maria attended private schools briefly, but her father directed her real education. An eclectic and somewhat eccentric thinker, Richard Lovell Edgeworth had a keen interest in science, engineering, and education. He exploited his eldest daughter’s proclivity for writing by making her his assistant on a number of projects that resulted in publications on educational theory, and he later directed the work of many of her novels.

When she was a teenager, Maria began writing down stories she told to the family as evening entertainments. At the same time, her father began assigning projects to her, among them a translation of Madame Stephanie de Genlis’s Adèle et Théodore (1782), an educational tract presented in the form of letters. Her father’s friend Thomas Day, another educational theorist and author of the pioneering children’s novel The History of Sandford and Merton (1783), prompted her to write philosophical tracts on subjects such as happiness. By the time Maria came of age, her future had been charted: She was to spend her life as an author, collaborating with her father on books about education and writing novels and stories illustrating principles of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s educational and social philosophy.

Life’s Work

The first fruit of the collaboration between Maria Edgeworth and her father was a slim volume titled Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), her own version of Adèle et Théodore in which women exchange ideas about education. A year later she issued The Parent’s Assistant: Or, Stories for Children (1796), a three-volume collection of children’s stories based on her father’s ideas about rearing children. Her father had a hand in both works, editing them carefully and advising his daughter about the virtues and vices her writing should depict. Maria published both books anonymously; when they were reissued in later years, their title pages bore her name alone.

Such was not the case with Practical Education (1798), a collection of essays that Maria wrote with her father outlining his theories. Its three volumes were influenced heavily by the work of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the book’s publication gave the Edgeworths a minor reputation as progressives in the field of educational theory. At the same time Maria was writing these volumes, she began a story based loosely on her reminiscences of John Langan, a former caretaker at Edgeworthtown. That Irishman had impressed the youthful Maria with his amusing stories and his lilting brogue, which Maria attempted to capture by making him the narrator of a tale about four generations of a dissolute English family who had ruined their Irish estate and its native tenant farmers. Published anonymously in 1800, Castle Rackrent became instantly popular in literary circles in both Ireland and England. Maria Edgeworth’s career as a writer of adult novels was launched propitiously.

Over the next seventeen years Maria wrote prolifically in the three genres for which she had prepared herself. She continued to write and publish children’s stories while pursuing her career as a writer of tales for adults as well. Often, rather than writing what would have been considered novels by her contemporaries—multivolume stories such as those by Henry Fielding and her contemporary Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald—she concentrated on works that normally occupied a single volume or less.

In 1809, Maria published the first series of Tales of Fashionable Life , a collection of four long tales that included one of her most memorable stories, Ennui (1809). Three years later she brought out the second series of the tales, one volume of which was The Absentee . This tale about an English landlord who returns to his Irish estates to find mismanagement and despair among his tenants is typical of the kind of social criticism that Edgeworth offered in many of her stories to give form to situations she had experienced or learned about as the daughter of an English landlord in Ireland.

In 1802, Maria accompanied her father to the Continent, where she was exposed at first hand to high society. While in Paris in November of 1802, she met Abraham N. C. Edelcrantz, the private secretary to the king of Sweden. A month after they met, Edelcrantz proposed marriage. Although her father thought well of her marrying Edelcrantz, Maria turned down his offer. She indicated in letters to family and friends that she preferred not to live in Sweden—or away from her father, to whom she was attached in a way that would raise speculation among scholars and biographers in later years.

By 1813, when the Edgeworths made an extended trip to England, Maria was lionized by high society not only for works such as Belinda (1801), Tales of Fashionable Life, and especially Castle Rackrent, but also for being her father’s collaborator on works such as Practical Education and its sequel, Essays on Professional Education (1809). Among those who met her and expressed their admiration was the poet George Gordon—better known as Lord Byron—who said that he wished his future wife to be like a character from Edgeworth’s novels. Maria’s reputation as the premier English novelist of the first decades of the nineteenth century was solidified with the publication of Patronage (1814) and two shorter tales published in 1817, Harrington and Ormond .

After the death of her father in 1817, however, Maria’s creativity seemed to diminish. She continued to work on revisions of earlier stories, but her principal work during the years after her father’s death were spent in completing Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq. (1820), a two-volume biography of the man who had so dominated her life and for whom she had expressed abiding affection.

During the 1820’s, Edgeworth produced a dozen volumes of stories and plays for children, but her next novel for adults, Helen , did not appear until 1834. It was to be the last work of serious fiction she would write. She spent the last three decades of her life at Edgeworthtown and paid occasional visits to England and Scotland. During her 1823 visit to Edinburgh, she met with Sir Walter Scott, who invited her to his home for an extended stay. She also received the poet William Wordsworth at her own home in Ireland in 1829. During her later years she oversaw the publication of two collected editions of her work. By the late 1830’s, the popularity of her novels had given way the books of other writers, most notably Charles Dickens. She died in Ireland on May 22, 1849.

Significance

From 1800 until the arrival of Dickens on the literary scene, Maria Edgeworth was considered one of the greatest living novelists. Only Sir Walter Scott rivaled her in reputation or popularity. She is considered the originator of the regional novel, having created in Castle Rackrent the formula for using local color and dialect as techniques for commenting on morality and society. Equally important, Edgeworth was the first notable writer of literature specifically aimed at children; her work provides simple stories with discernible morals woven into exciting tales that capture children’s attention and help them learn while being entertained. The best of her novels of social commentary, Ennui and The Absentee, provide insights into the plight of the English and Irish during the turbulent period when Ireland was firmly under English rule.

Edgeworth’s Major Fictional Works

Novels

1800

• Castle Rackrent

1801

• Belinda

1806

• Leonora

1809

• Ennui

1812

• The Absentee

1812

• Vivian

1814

• Patronage

1817

• Harrington

1817

• Ormond

1834

• Helen

Short Fiction

1805

• The Modern Griselda

1809-1812

• Tales of Fashionable Life

1825

• Tales and Miscellaneous Pieces

1832

• Garry Owen: Or, The Snow-Woman, and Poor Bob, the Chimney-Sweeper

1848

• Orlandino

1883

• Classic Tales

Children’s Books

1796

• The Parent’s Assistant: Or, Stories for Children

1801

• Harry and Lucy (with Richard Lovell Edgeworth)

1801

• Rosamond (with Richard Lovell Edgeworth)

1801

• Frank (with Richard Lovell Edgeworth)

1801

• Moral Tales for Young People

1801

• The Mental Thermometer

1804

• Popular Tales

1814

• Continuation of Early Lessons

1821

• Rosamond: A Sequel to Early Lessons

1822

• Frank: A Sequel to Frank in Early Lessons

1825

• Harry and Lucy Concluded

1931

• The Purple Jar, and Other Stories

Bibliography

Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Biography. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1972. This detailed account of Edgeworth’s writing career is the standard twentieth century biography. Butler weaves throughout her story of Edgeworth’s life and relationship with her eccentric father critical commentary that demonstrates how events shaped both her fiction and nonfiction. Her bibliography contains an extensive list of primary sources, including letters and other unpublished writings.

Gonda, Caroline. Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709-1834. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Gonda includes a chapter on Edgeworth’s relationship with her father and the resultant influence the latter had in shaping his daughter’s fiction. In the course of her critique, Gonda challenges earlier readings of Edgeworth’s career offered by Butler and Kowaleski-Wallace.

Harden, O. E. Maria Edgeworth. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Harden provides a chronology and brief biographical sketch, examines a number of novels and nonfiction works Edgeworth completed with her father, and assesses Edgeworth’s achievements. The volume also includes an annotated bibliography.

Hollingworth, Brian. Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writings. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Hollingworth’s principal interest is in Edgeworth’s regional novels, a genre of which Edgeworth is frequently considered the first practitioner. He explains how Edgeworth’s upbringing as the daughter of an English landlord in Ireland influenced her novels about that country.

Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Their Father’s Daughters. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Edgeworth’s career is examined in detail in this study of several eighteenth and nineteenth century women authors whose fathers dominated their lives. Kowaleski-Wallace examines strategies these women used to react against patriarchal expectations of their appropriate role as writers.