MARIA EDGEWORTH: INTRODUCTION

Although Edgeworth wrote in a variety of genres, she is primarily associated with the early English novel of manners and the Irish regional novel. She also produced a number of didactic children's tales that were popular in her own time, but are largely forgotten today. Her most highly-regarded works are Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale (1800), a novel based on a family memoir written by Edgeworth's grandfather, and Belinda (1801), a three-volume novel of manners.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Born January 1, 1768, at Black Bourton in Oxfordshire, Edgeworth was the eldest daughter of Anna Maria Elers and the educator and inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the most significant figure in her life and in her writing career. In 1773, Edgeworth's mother died and her father remarried almost immediately. He would eventually father a total of twenty-two children by four different wives, and the demands of caring for her many siblings caused Edgeworth to leave school at the age of fifteen. In 1782, her father moved the family to Edgeworthstown, his ancestral estate in Ireland, and became active in Irish politics and economic reform. During this time, in addition to overseeing the education of the younger children, Edgeworth assisted her father as his secretary. She began writing children's stories to amuse her brothers and sisters, and together with her father produced a volume of essays on childrearing, Practical Education (1798). She then turned to novel writing, publishing her first novel in 1800 and her second a year later.

Edgeworth's work was widely read, but she was uncomfortable with public attention, preferring the quiet domestic life she advocated for women. Despite numerous invitations to visit England, she made her first trip—in the company of her father, stepmother, and sister—in 1813. She was introduced to many of the leading intellectuals and literary figures of her time, and while Edgeworth herself was warmly received, her father was not, which disturbed her greatly and contributed to her withdrawal from literary society. She returned to Ireland where she continued writing, administering the education of her younger siblings, the last of whom was born in 1812, and helping to manage the family estate. Her father died in 1817 after a long illness and Edgeworth was charged with completing his autobiography. His Memoirs were finally published in 1820, and again her father's unpopularity led to widespread attacks in the press. Flaws in her writing were invariably attributed to the contaminating influence of her father's social and political ideas. Although she was stung by such criticism of her father, his death enabled her to venture again into the literary societies of both England and Scotland. At the same time, she gained control of the family estate—which had been mismanaged by her brother—and capably handled all facets of its operation until 1839. She continued writing, publishing her last novel, Helen, in 1834, and a children's story, Orlandino, in 1848. She died on May 22, 1849, at the age of eighty-one at the family estate in Edgeworthstown.

MAJOR WORKS

In 1795 Edgeworth published Letters for Literary Ladies, a three-part work consisting of an exchange of correspondence between two men on the education of women, followed by an epistolary novella featuring two young female characters, and "An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification." With this work, Edgeworth joined the contemporary literary debate on women's rights, but unlike such revolutionary feminists as Mary Wollstonecraft, she advocated a more conventional role for women—one that restricted their intellectual activities to the domestic sphere, where they might exercise their influence through mediation rather than direct participation in public discourse. Her next work, The Parent's Assistant (1796), was a collection of didactic short stories intended for children. Edgeworth's most critically acclaimed work was her first novel, Castle Rackrent, an account of four generations of the Rackrent family narrated by Thady Quirk, the family's loyal retainer. The work drew on the family history of the Edgeworths and incorporated social criticism of both the Anglo-Irish gentry and the middle class. It is considered one of the first English novels to represent working-class life, and is also regarded as the first Irish regional novel. Edgeworth's next effort, Belinda, employed the conventions of the novel of manners to attack the excesses and moral bankruptcy of the fashionable elite, while at the same time warning against the vulgarity the author associated with the middle class. The work's eponymous heroine was charged with finding a middle ground between female independence and domesticity.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

By many accounts, Edgeworth was the most commercially successful as well as the most critically acclaimed female writer of her time. Today, however, her novels and essays are not widely read, although her work has attracted considerable attention from feminist theorists and literary historians. While she is considered an early feminist or proto-feminist by some scholars, largely because of her advocacy of education for women, others believe her writings reinforce the power of the patriarchy by encouraging women to confine themselves to domestic life. Marilyn Butler suggests that Castle Rackrent can be read as a progressive, even radical, work that anticipates the nineteenth-century realist novel. She contends that in the novel "old aristocratic stories of male dominance and legitimacy are being challenged by democratized women-centered plots of family life in which servants, including female servants, wield power, and almost anything is negotiable." Similarly, Edgeworth's 1809 story "Ennui," from Tales of Fashionable Life (1809-12), features three main characters who are powerful women and authority figures according to Butler. Nicholas Mason takes issue with those critics who insist that Edgeworth's work exhibits complicity with the patriarchy because of its emphasis on domesticity. Mason maintains that her version of domesticity extends beyond gender issues and encompasses issues of class as well: "more than a system for proper female behavior, the domesticity Edgeworth advocates is a summons for all members of polite society, whether female or male, to live up to their gender- and class-based responsibilities." Gender issues aside, most critics acknowledge Edgeworth's innovations in literary form, including her contribution to the development of the novel of manners and the regional novel, and her innovations in subject matter, particularly her representations of working-class characters.