ABOUT

Maria Edgeworth was born on 1 January 1768 to the Irish landowner Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his first wife, Anna Maria Elers. Neglected in her youth, Edgeworth and her family removed to Edgeworthstown, Ireland in 1782 where she began to collaborate with her father on literary and educational projects, as well as assisting with rents and estate business. Her earliest published works were treatises on women’s and children’s education (Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) and Essays on Practical Education (1798), co-written with Richard Lovell), stories for children (The Parent’s Assistant (1796)), a regional Irish novel (Castle Rackrent (1800)), and a domestic novel (Belinda (1801)). Edgeworth continued to write and publish prolifically in multiple genres through the early decades of the nineteenth century until her death on 22 May 1849. She was considered “the most commercially successful novelist of her age” (ODNB) and, besides her novels, was known for her educational texts, her intellectualism – she appropriated scientific diction and was an honorary inductee into the Royal Society of Ireland – and her liberal-mindedness; Edgeworth notoriously attempted to atone for past anti-semitic themes in her works by writing Harrington (1817), a novel in which the eponymous hero falls in love with a Jewish woman. Edgeworth wrote thousands of surviving letters that contain descriptions of literary and historical figures (among them Sir Walter Scott, Madame de Staël, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Burney), places (including Ireland, London, and Paris), and events (such as the French invasion of Ireland, the aftermath of the Act of Union, and the great Irish famine).