Meet Maria Edgeworth and the Edgeworth family
Born 250 years ago, the writer achieved peak fame in her Co Longford home, writes Susan Manly
Maria Edgeworth, pioneering writer of the Irish national novel, was born on 1st January 1768, 250 years ago. She was the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Richard was an Anglo-Irish landowner and the inventor of an early version of the telegraph, among other mechanical innovations. He devoted himself to projects he saw as improving Ireland’s prospects: national education, agricultural improvement, and draining bogs. But his anti-sectarian, non-partisan and democratic convictions meant that for much of his life, he was regarded with suspicion by the Anglo-Irish elite.
Richard’s commitment to political and social reform and his determination to be useful to Ireland were important influences on Maria’s development as a thinker and writer. Her father’s energetic engagement with progressive causes gave her an identity and a purpose, and raised her ambitions above those of many of her female contemporaries. Richard saw his daughter’s talent and encouraged her to write from a very early age, setting prompts for stories that he challenged her to complete.
At 14, Maria began to take a lively interest in political debate and economics and in the lives of her tenants. Unafraid of thinking for herself and drawing her own conclusions from her reading and observations, she wrote to a school friend of her conviction that lack of economic progress in Ireland was the fault of the low-wage (or no-wage) culture instituted by the rich, which discouraged entrepreneurialism and agricultural improvement.
Although her home was in Ireland, Maria spent various periods between 1791 and 1803 abroad, in England, Scotland and France. From 1791 to 1793, the family rented lodgings in Bristol, a centre of radical activity and hotbed of intellectual and scientific endeavour, and it was here that many of Maria’s first children’s stories were conceived. In 1796, she published the first of numerous collections of lively tales for children and adolescents, born of her hands-on experience educating her younger siblings.
She now embarked on an intensive period of writing that would see her established as an internationally famous author, with eight books to her credit by 1802. The first of her works to attract widespread public attention across Europe was Practical Education (1798), her manual of children’s education. Deliberately evading sectarianism, it made no mention of religious instruction, and was packed with ideas for experiments and practical puzzles suitable for children with enquiring minds. The book was a hit. Her reputation quickly spread via translations and journals in Europe and America.
Yet 1798 was an awkward time to produce a progressive book. The English ruling class was preoccupied with fears of imminent invasion from France and government surveillance and reaction against radicals and intellectuals meant that pro-democratic movements became suspect. Ireland was in turmoil, stirred by the prospect of secession from Britain, an end to oppressive landlordism, and full civil equality for Catholics. In August 1798 the French landed in County Mayo, and inflicted a notable defeat on a large Anglo-Irish army at Castlebar, sparking country-wide agitation, and igniting what had been a smouldering state of insurrection across Ireland for much of the preceding decade. The French army then advanced on a course which would take it through County Longford, close to the Edgeworths’ home. Richard, whose anti-sectarianism was well known, was nearly lynched by an ultra-Protestant mob in Longford, suspected of being a French spy or United Irishman – a traumatic event which Maria would later reuse for her description of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 in her historical novel, Harrington (1817).
Maria’s imagination was deeply stirred by the events of 1798 and subsequent debates about Ireland’s political future. In 1799, she began working with her father to theorise what mass education in Ireland would look like. In 1800 she published her first (and perhaps still her bestknown) fictional work for adult readers, Castle Rackrent – a satire on Anglo-Irish landlords and their claims to ownership of land. She and Richard went on to write the Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), a response to Protestant Ascendancy propaganda in the wake of the 1798 uprising, which set out to disprove English stereotypes of the Irish and to celebrate Irish powers of eloquence and invention. In these and in three of Maria’s subsequent novels set in Ireland and published between 1809 and 1817, Maria set out to correct misrepresentations of the Irish and to imagine improved prospects for her country.
Maria published three other new works in 1801, including Belinda, a lively and very funny novel following the adventures of a young woman set adrift in high society as she strives to think for herself amid the perils of the marriage market. The novel included a sharp satire on her father’s friend Thomas Day’s limited ideas of female education. Maria’s next novel, Leonora (1806), addressed the question of women’s freedom and sexual double standards. She then began work on a long novel, Patronage in 1809, quickly followed by Ennui (also 1809), about an idle and bored aristocrat who returns to his Irish estate and finds a new identity and purpose to his life in working for the benefit of his tenants. The Absentee (1812) attacks fashionable English society and the irresponsible behaviour of English absentee landlords in Ireland. It portrays post-Union Ireland as a place of conspicuous and lavish consumption among the propertied classes, neglectful of their duty towards the peasant masses. Maria’s readers greatly admired The Absentee for its seriousness, attention to factual detail, and realistic portrait of Irish high and low society: a contemporary critic commented that the novel presented ‘the most diversified views that have ever been drawn of a national character’.
On 13 June 1817, Richard died; his health had begun to break down in 1814, and such was Maria’s preoccupation with his illness that her productivity slowed. After 1817 she published only two more full-length books, declaring that
her motive for writing sustained fiction was gone. She did, however, honour the promise she made to her father on his death-bed that she would complete and publish his Memoirs. Although her previous works had been singled out for very full and favourable reviews in the leading magazines of the day – the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews – the reception of the Memoirs in 1820 was savage. Critics argued that Maria’s own writing and reputation were polluted by association with her father, whose ‘irreligion’ was evident from the Memoirs.
This critical backlash meant that Maria became wary of publishing new work for adults, although she did publish further tales for adolescents in the 1820s. Much later, she published Helen (1834), which explored women’s friendships, the dangers of capitulation to male authority, and women’s influence in public life. In her last thirty years she travelled in Ireland, England, Scotland and the Continent, recording her social encounters in witty, lively letters, while at home she showed resourcefulness in managing the Edgeworthstown estate. The letters that Maria wrote in the last three decades of her life reveal her disquiet about Daniel O’Connell and the increasing conflict between tenants and landowners. But in a letter to an American correspondent in 1831 she acknowledged the inevitability of social change and the need for political reform: ‘Nations must have revolutions. The poor become too poor to endure their poverty well and too numerous to endure it without combining for the destruction of those who are richer and happier than themselves, and whom they consider (whether they are or not) as the sole cause of their sufferings.’
Maria Edgeworth was undoubtedly the most commercially successful and prestigious novelist in Britain and Ireland in her time, evident in her earnings: she herself calculated that in all she earned over £11,000 from her writing, which amounts to an immense fortune in 2018. Her reputation has suffered since the years of her greatest success, in the nineteenth century, in part because of her choice of form: her fiction communicates ideas and debates, rather than seeking to immerse readers in romance or fantasy. Her dialogue is sparkling and witty, though not naturalistic in the way that we feel Jane Austen’s to be. But now, 250 years after her birth, Maria Edgeworth’s achievements as a writer and novelist of ideas are once again being recognised – and celebrated. She deserves to be more widely read and understood as a writer whose work was rooted in her profound attachment and loyalty to Ireland and its people.
The author is currently writing a political biography of Maria Edgeworth, to be published in 2020. She has edited and co-edited numerous works by Edgeworth including Harrington, Practical Education, Helen and Leonora; and a selection of Edgeworth’s stories for children and young adults.