cl11aria {)igevvorth (1768-1849) In his 1829 preface to Waverley, Walter Scott acknowledges his considerable debt to the artistry of Maria Edgeworth, author of the innovative novel Castle Rackrent (1800): "Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact which pervade the works of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland." Lord Byron recalled in 1813, "I had been the lion of 1812: Miss Edgeworth and Madame de Stael ... were the ex­ hibitions of the succeeding year." 1 Author of Belinda, Leonora, Patronage, and other novels and tales, Edgeworth was one of the most respected educational writers and novelists of the age. Moreover, her tales for children, informed by Enlightenment educational theory and shaped by her role as surrogate mother to her many younger siblings, were popular and influential. Born at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, on 1 January 1768, Maria was the second surviving child and eldest daughter of Anna Maria Elers and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, an Anglo-Irish landowner, educational theorist, scien­ tist, and author. Maria Edgeworth's mother died in childbirth in 1773, and Maria grew up adoring and emulating her father, who married four times altogether, eventually producing twenty-two children, eighteen of whom survived infancy.2 His second wife, Honora Sneyd, was the foster sister of Anna Seward. Maria Edgeworth grew up on Anna Letitia Barbauld's Lessons for Children and attended boarding schools in England, where she received conventional instruction. Although she was sometimes considered "naughty;' her childhood was a relatively happy one. In 1782 her nonconformist father, who adhered to the ideas of the English I. Byron's "Ravenna Journal;' 19 January 1821, in "Born for Opposition," vol. 8 of Byron's Letters and Journals (London, 1978), 29. 2. The last of Maria Edgeworth's siblings was born in 1812. She was older than her father's fourth wife. Maria Edgeworth provincial Enlightenment and was the friend of Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Day, James Watt, and Josiah Wedgwood, returned with his family to his estate at Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Ireland, to take part in Irish reform. Maria, who was fifteen, became her father's intellectual companion, amanuensis, domestic helper, and assistant in running the estate. Her first literary work was a translation he requested of Madame de Genlis's Adele et Theodore. When her father returned to London in 1791, she remained in Ireland, where she forged a deep and lasting friendship with his sister, Margaret Ruxton. Edgeworth eventually joined her father and stepmother in England, but she disliked fashionable London society. The family returned to Ireland in 1793· In 1795 Edgeworth published Letters for Literary Ladies with Joseph John­ son, publisher of Erasmus Darwin, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Joseph Priestley, and others, who was to bring out all of her work until his death two decades later. The book argues for the intellectual capacities and rights of women but advocates that they remain in the domestic sphere rather than enter the political realm. The following year she brought out her hugely successful vol­ ume The Parent's Assistant, which comprised stories and a play for children in the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Trimmer, Madame de Genlis, and Thomas Day, espousing Edgeworth family progressive educational theory. Edgeworth became her father's assistant in literary as well as in business matters, co-authoring several books with him, including Practical Education (1798), which outlines the theories behind the stories in The Parent's Assis­ tant. Practical Education applies Enlightenment principles to early childhood education, drawing examples from the Edgeworth family; it was immedi­ ately recognized as an important book. These ideas are further illustrated in Maria Edgeworth's Early Lessons (1801), for children. In 1799 she and her father proposed to Anna Letitia Barbauld that they start a liberal journal for women, to be called the Feminead, but Barbauld rejected the idea, be­ lieving that ideological differences between women authors would keep the journal from succeeding. Maria Edgeworth's innovative first novel, Castle Rackrent, published in January 1800, was written without her father's guid­ ance and published anonymously. Considered a landmark in the history of the novel for its technique, it is a portrait, both comic and critical, of Irish provincial life, with a humorously unreliable narrator using everyday speech. It depicts a series of irresponsible landlords, a metaphor for British over­ sight of Ireland, and the inevitability of capitalist forces' undermining the power of an already grossly corrupt and irresponsible aristocracy. This book was to have a profound influence on Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. Her next book, Belinda (1801), is a novel of manners with an independent heroine who is both feminine and rational. M.aria Edgeworth 233 It critiques fashionable society and the ideology of sensibility as it portrays Belinda making her way for the first time in the adult world and choosing between three suitors. Edgeworth collaborated with her father to pen the Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), a complex and highly ironic text ostensibly about "Irish bulls," a type of contradiction or paradox, but, more importantly, a defense of Irish speech patterns and culture. In the fall of 1802 Edgeworth took a tour through the Midlands of England with her family, continuing on to Paris, where she and her father were feted for their educational works and met intellectuals and writers, including Madame de Genlis. With much pain, in December she declined a proposal of marriage from a Swedish courtier and intellectual, Abraham Niclas Clewberg-Edelcrantz, though her father urged her to accept. Before returning home they visited Glasgow and Edinburgh, where Maria met the novelist Elizabeth Hamilton and leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment. Her Popular Tales (1804) are a critique of Hannah More's "Cheap Reposi­ tory" tracts, which advocate patience, uncomplaining suffering, subordina­ tion, and a religious faith that looks to an afterlife for its reward. Edgeworth focuses instead on the virtues of toleration, self-discipline, self-improvement, and the support of the family. Unbeknownst to her father, in 1805 Edgeworth published The Modern Griselda, a satire on women who aspire to high society and reject domestic roles. She elaborates in Leonora (1806), an epistolary, satirical novel with a bright, virtuous, domestic heroine at its center. In 1809 the Edgeworths brought out Essays on Prefessional Education, concerned with moral and intellectual instruction and advocating professions independent of the patronage system. Maria Edgeworth's Tales ef Fashionable Life (1809, 1812), including "Ennui" and "The Absentee;' set the social criticisms of the Essays in fictional form, using realistic detail and dialect. These tales attack rniddle­ class aspirations for "fashionable" society and advocate reform, principally through the professionalization of the gentry. In l8II she wrote notes and a preface for Mary Leadbeater's Cottage Dialogues Among the Irish Peasantry. Although by this time Edgeworth had become one of the most widely read and respected authors in Britain, she repeatedly rejected invitations to leave Ireland to be lionized. But in the spring of 1813 she did make a long trip to England with her family. She saw William Roscoe in Liverpool, and in London she met Mary Berry, Thomas Malthus, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, and Jane Marcet, a scientist with whom she corresponded for some years afterwards. While Edgeworth was well liked, her father was consid­ ered overbearing. On this trip Edgeworth also saw Etienne Dumont, a Swiss intellectual with whom she had been exchanging letters for years and whom she considered marrying. Patronage (1814) contrasts the lives of two families belonging to the landed Maria Edgeworth gentry, the Falconers and the Percys. The Falconers ultimately fail because of their reliance on the patronage system and blind chance; the Percys pros­ per by cultivating self-discipline, independence, and professional knowledge. Caroline Percy is Edgeworth's model woman, who looks for an intellectual equal in a husband and marries Count Altenberg, an idealized version of Edgeworth's own unsuccessful Swedish suitor, Edelcrantz. Edgeworth earned the enormous sum of twenty-one hundred pounds for this reformist novel. Edgeworth published her Continuation of Early Lessons in 1814 and wrote the preface and final chapter, "On Parody," for her father's Readings on Poetry (1816). Her memoir of the novelist Elizabeth Hamilton appeared in the Sep­ tember 1816 issue of the Monthly Magazine, and in r817 she published Comic Dramas in Three Acts. Harrington (1817) is a novel inspired by a correspon­ dence with Rachel Mordecai, an American Jew who wrote to Edgeworth to object to her stereotyping of Jewish characters. Harrington contains several examples of admirable Jewish characters, including the virtuous, cultivated, and wealthy Montenero, an intellectual, Israel Lyons, and an honorable ped­ dler. The hero of the novel, the young professional Harrington, overcomes his fear ofJews and eventually falls in love with and marries Berenice, whom he believes to be Jewish but who is revealed in the end to be Christian. The novel also includes some of Edgeworth's earlier themes-the superiority of reason over prejudice or custom, the potential of the middle class to be­ come cultured and public-spirited, and the need for the working classes to be treated more fairly. Ormond, a novel published with Harrington, has an Irish protagonist mod­ eled on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones who has adventures in England, Ireland, and France. He rejects French court culture and fashionable coquettes and marries a virtuous and sensible Englishwoman, symbolically carrying out a "union" of English and Irish gentry. Eighteen seventeen was a difficult year for Edgeworth, for in June her father died; she completed and published his Memoirs in 1820.