Maria Edgeworth
born Jan. 1, 1767, Blackbourton, Oxfordshire,
Eng.
died May 22, 1849, Edgeworthstown, Ire.
Anglo-Irish writer, known for her children’s stories and for her novels
of Irish life.
She lived in England until 1782, when the family went to Edgeworthstown,
County Longford, in midwestern Ireland, where Maria, then 15 and the
eldest daughter, assisted her father in managing his estate. In this way
she acquired the knowledge of rural economy and of the Irish peasantry
that was to be the backbone of her novels. Domestic life at
Edgeworthstown was busy and happy. Encouraged by her father, Maria began
her writing in the common sitting room, where the 21 other children in
the family provided material and audience for her stories. She published
them in 1796 as The Parent’s Assistant. Even the intrusive moralizing,
attributed to her father’s editing, does not wholly suppress their
vitality, and the children who appear in them, especially the impetuous
Rosamond, are the first real children in English literature since
Shakespeare.
Her first novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), written without her father’s
interference, reveals her gift for social observation, character sketch,
and authentic dialogue and is free from lengthy lecturing. It
established the genre of the “regional novel,” and its influence was
enormous; Sir Walter Scott acknowledged his debt to Edgeworth in writing
Waverley. Her next work, Belinda (1801), a society novel unfortunately
marred by her father’s insistence on a happy ending, was particularly
admired by Jane Austen.
Edgeworth never married. She had a wide acquaintance in literary and
scientific circles. Between 1809 and 1812 she published her Tales of
Fashionable Life in six volumes. They include one of her best novels,
The Absentee, which focused attention on a great contemporary abuse in
Irish society: absentee English landowning.
Before her father’s death in 1817 she published three more novels,
two of them, Patronage (1814) and Ormond (1817), of considerable power.
After 1817 she wrote less. She completed her father’s Memoirs (1820) and
devoted herself to the estate. She enjoyed a European reputation and
exchanged cordial visits with Scott. Her last years were saddened by the
Irish famine of 1846, during which she worked for the relief of stricken
peasants.
The feminist movement of the 1960s led to the reprinting of her Moral
Tales for Young People, 5 vol. (1801) and Letters for Literary Ladies
(1795) in the 1970s. Her novels continued to be regularly reprinted in
the 20th century.
