Maria Edgeworth

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The British author Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) wrote novels that are characterized by clear, vivid style, good humor, and lively dialogue.

Maria Edgeworth was born on Jan. 1, 1767, the second of the 21 children (by four wives) of Richard Edgeworth, whose family supposedly came from Edgeware, England, to Edgeworthtown, Ireland, about 1573. Richard Edgeworth was a model landlord, living on his estates and improving them. Maria's mother died when she was 6, and within a few months her father married again. Maria was happy with all her stepmothers, the last being 20 years her junior, and spent her whole life surrounded by her family, never even having a room of her own. She worked in the living room at a desk her father made for her, writing on folio sheets she sewed together in chapters.

When she was 16, Maria became her father's secretary and accountant. Edgeworth was devoted to J.J. Rousseau's ideas and brought up his children on Thomas Day's Sand-ford and Merton, a didactic educational book. Richard encouraged Maria to write, and together they produced Practical Education, which advised parents to deliver short sermons, to instruct gradually, and to teach mainly by conversation. Maria's own first book was The Parents' Assistant (1796), a delightful collection of short stories, of which the most famous is "Two Strings to His Bow." The same year appeared her Letters from Literary Ladies.

In 1800 Miss Edgeworth published Castle Rackrent, of which Irish author Padraic Colum wrote, "One can read it in an hour. Then one knows why the whole force of England could not break the Irish people." She was the first to depict Irish peasants as human beings. Miss Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812) was written as a play, but Richard Sheridan, who wanted to produce it, found the censor would not allow public discussion of the spending of Irish rents in England. The Russian Ivan Turgenev declared he got a revelation from Maria Edgeworth's stories, and the word "absenteeism" occurs on the first page of his Smoke. Sir Walter Scott said that he hoped "in some distant degree to emulate the admirable Irish portraits of Miss Edgeworth" and that she had shown him his path; in fact, Waverley has been called a Scots Castle Rackrent. Jeanie Deans, in Scott's Heart of Midlothian, may have been modeled on Maria Edgeworth.

Later novels by Miss Edgeworth were Belinda (1801), Ormond (1817), Frank (1822), and Harry and Lucy (1825). Sir Walter Scott stated that "in natural appearance she is quite the fairy Whipity of our nursery tale … who came flying in through the window to work all sort of marvels. Maria writes while she reads, speaks, eats, drinks and no doubt while she sleeps." Calm, cheerful, and unselfish, she was small and slight, with bright, very blue eyes and tiny hands and feet.

In 1802 Miss Edgeworth went with her father, stepmother, and a small sister to Paris, where she met Madame de Genlis, one of whose books she had translated, and J.A. de Ségur, who had translated her Belinda. Her father, to whom she submitted and who corrected all her writing, was thought by all to be a pompous bore. Miss Edgeworth was so modest that Lord Byron wrote, "No one would have suspected she could write her name"; he added, "Her father thought nothing except his own name worth writing." After her father's death Miss Edgeworth took two of her sisters abroad, spending more than a year in France and Switzerland. She was proposed to by the Chevalier Edencrantz, confidential secretary to the king of Sweden, but she would not leave her family, or he his monarch.

In 1823 Miss Edgeworth spent 2 weeks with Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, and in 1825 Scott visited her at Edgeworthtown, which had become a shrine at which all visitors to Ireland paid homage. In 1844 she was made a member of the Royal Irish Academy. At 70 she learned Spanish. During the potato famine of 1847, she worked among the starving. She died on May 22, 1849. Asked during her lifetime to furnish biographical details, she replied that "as a woman" her life had been "wholly domestic and could be of no interest to the public." Her stepmother wrote after Miss Edgeworth's death that "her whole life of eighty-three years, has been an aspiration after good."

Further Reading

Two works on Maria Edgeworth are Isabel C. Clarke, Maria Edgeworth, Her Family and Friends (1950), and Elizabeth Inglis-Jones, The Great Maria (1959). An older work is Emily Lawless, Maria Edgeworth (1904).

Additional Sources

Clarke, Isabel Constance, Maria Edgeworth, her family and friends, Philadelphia: R. West, 1976.

Inglis-Jones, Elisabeth, The great Maria: portrait of Maria Edgeworth by Elisabeth Inglis-Jones, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978 1959.

Edgeworth, Maria (1767-1849), novelist. The third child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, she was born at Black Bourton near Reading and educated there and in London, moving with her father to the family estate at Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, in 1782. She taught the children of his later marriages, sharing his progressive ideas on education. Her early writings, encouraged by him, led to The Parent's Assistant (1796), a series of children's stories in the didactic manner. This was followed by Practical Education (2 vols., 1798), a joint work recommending learning through recreation. Her children's series was continued in Early Lessons (1801), Moral Tales (1801), concluding with Harry and Lucy (1825). In 1800 Maria published Castle Rackrent, the earliest regional novel in English. Belinda (1810) is a satiric novel in which the wicked Lady Delacour is reformed. Essay on Irish Bulls (1802) was written with her father, Popular Tales and The Modern Griselda (both 1805) without him. After a period in Paris she composed Tales of Fashionable Life, the first series (1809) containing Ennui (vol. I); Almeria, Madame de Fleury, and The Dun (vol. II); and Manœuvring (vol. III). The second series, also three volumes, contained Vivian, Emilie de Coulanges, and The Absentee (1812). Ormond (1817) is a novel innovative in its exploration of the effect of reading on the hero. She edited and completed her father's Memoirs (1820). In later years she was largely occupied with rectifying her brother's mismanagement of the Edgeworthstown estate, and in relieving victims of the Famine. Of her later novels, Harrington (1817) reflects the lack of her father's enthusiastic encouragement, while Helen (1834) presents a depressing view of the prospects for Irish society. Her last work, Orlandino (1848), was written for the Poor Relief Fund.

Bibliography

Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth (1972).

Quotes:

"The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return."

Maria Edgeworth
Born	1 January 1767(1767-01-01) Black Bourton, Oxfordshire
Died	22 May 1849 (aged 82) Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Ireland
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	Anglo-Irish

Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1767 – 22 May 1849) was an Anglo-Irish novelist.

Biography

Maria Edgeworth was born at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Anna Maria Edgeworth née Elers and thus an aunt of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth. On her father's second marriage in 1773, she went with him to Ireland, where she eventually was to settle on his estate, Edgeworthstown, in County Longford. There, she mixed with the Anglo-Irish gentry, particularly Kitty Pakenham (later the wife of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington), Lady Moira, and her aunt Margaret Ruston of Black Castle.

She acted as manager of her father's estate, later drawing on this experience for her novels about the Irish. Edgeworth's early literary efforts were melodramatic rather than realistic. One of her schoolgirl novels features a villain who wore a mask made from the skin of a dead man's face. Maria's first published work was Letters for Literary Ladies in 1795, followed in 1796 by her first children's book, The Parent's Assistant (which included the story The Purple Jar), and in 1800 by her first novel Castle Rackrent.

In 1802 the Edgeworth family went abroad, first to Brussels and then to Consulate France (during the Peace of Amiens, a brief lull in the Napoleonic Wars). They met all the notables, and Maria received a marriage proposal from a Swedish courtier, Count Edelcrantz. Her letter on the subject seems very cool, but her stepmother assures us in the Augustus Hare "Life and Letters," that Maria loved him very much and did not get over the affair quickly. They came home to Ireland in 1803 on the eve of the resumption of the wars and Maria returned to writing.

Mr. Edgeworth, a well-known author and inventor, encouraged his daughter's career, and has been criticized for his insistence on approving and editing her work. The tales in The Parent's Assistant were approved by her father before he would allow them to be read to her younger siblings (he had four wives and 22 children). Castle Rackrent was written and submitted for anonymous publication without his knowledge.

On a visit to London in 1813 Maria met Lord Byron and Humphry Davy. She entered into a long correspondence with Sir Walter Scott after the publication of Waverley in 1814 and visited him in Scotland at Abbotsford House.

After her father's death in 1817 she edited his memoirs, and extended them with her biographical comments. She was an active writer to the last, and worked strenuously for the relief of the famine-stricken Irish peasants during the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849). She died in Edgeworthstown in 1849.

Maria Edgeworth was explicit about the fact that all her stories had a moral purpose behind them, usually pointing out the duty of members of the upper class toward their tenants. However, her style did not pass muster with one of the religious leaders of the day: the Baptist preacher Robert Hall said, "I should class her books as among the most irreligious I have ever read ... she does not attack religion, nor inveigh against it, but makes it appear unnecessary by exhibiting perfect virtue without it ... No works ever produced so bad an effect on my mind as hers."

Partial list of published works

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Maria Edgeworth

• Letters for Literary Ladies - 1795
• The Parent's Assistant - 1796
• Practical Education - 1798 (2 vols; collaborated with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth)
• Castle Rackrent (1800) (novel)
• Early Lessons - 1801
• Belinda - (1801) (novel)
• Essay on Irish Bulls - 1802 (political, collaborated with her father)
• Popular Tales - 1804
• The Modern Griselda - 1804
• Moral Tales for Young People - 1805 (6 vols)
• Leonora - 1806 (written during the French excursion)
• Tales of Fashionable Life - 1809 (first in a series, includes The Absentee)
• Ennui - 1809 (novel)
• The Absentee - 1812 (novel)
• Patronage - 1814 (novel)
• Harrington - 1817 (novel)
• Ormond - 1817 (novel)
• Comic Dramas - 1817
• Memoirs - 1820 (edited her father's memoirs)
• Early Lessons - 1822 (sequels to some of the tales)
• Helen - 1834 (novel)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Maria Edgeworth

Sources

• Works by Maria Edgeworth at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Maria Edgeworth at Internet Archive

Other

• Biography on Revolutionary Players website
• Edgeworthstown From "Irish Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil" (1888)
• Archival material relating to Maria Edgeworth listed at the UK National Register of Archives

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