91

Maria Edgeworth

1767–1849

 

Though her name may not be familiar to all, except, perhaps, students in Ireland who have to read her novel Castle Rackrent as part of their literature courses, Maria Edgeworth has an important place in the history of not only Irish but European and American literature.  Sir Walter Scott admitted that it was from her tales of Irish life, so racy of the soil, that he derived the notion of writing his own series of romantic novels of Scottish history.  His novels, in turn, inspired James Fenimore Cooper, Alessandro Manzoni, Ivan Turgenev, and many others who attempted to combine scenes of domestic life within a setting of national destiny.  Out of the novel so many Irish schoolchildren groan over arose a whole aspect of the Romantic Movement in literature.

      This was something of an achievement for a lady, and she was a lady, who lived much of her life in a mansion house on her father's estate isolated in the bogs of western Ireland.  Her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was an important figure, not only in the life of his daughter but in intellectual society in general.  He was a much married man, with a passion for invention and education.  Together with his daughter he wrote Practical Education, a book of great importance in the development of modern education, for they based their whole system, derived from Rousseau to some extent, on the reasoning and conversations of children, largely his own.  Like the best of modern education it was child-centred.

      Maria's life was not lived in the shadow of her father; indeed, if anyone hears of him it is through his connection with her.  Maria Edgeworth was the second child and eldest daughter of Richard and his first wife.  She was born in her grandparents' house at Black Bourton, in Oxfordshire, on New Year's Day 1767.  They were the kind of family that travelled much in England and France, but after 1793 much of their time was spent in Ireland at Edgeworthstown.  Her letters are a rich source, not only for her own life but for the hectic times they lived through.  She had rather grand families as neighbours, such as the family of Lord Longford and others.  She also got to know the ordinary people around town and on her father's estate.

      Though she wrote a great deal under her father's influence, her novels were her own.  Her first one, Castle Rackrent, appeared anonymously in 1800, the year of the Act of Union.  It tells the story of a tumbled and decayed great house in rural Ireland and the decline of the family over several generations through the eyes of Thady, a loyal family retainer, whose praise of their lifestyle reads as an ironic commentary on the whole state of Ireland that had just led to the uprising of 1798.  Maria Edgeworth wrote many other tales and stories, often of fashionable life, of which The Absentee (1812) is among the most important, dealing again with Irish affairs.

      In 1802 the family went to Europe, and she refused an offer of marriage from a Swedish count.  Though she seemed unperturbed, her stepmother thought she regretted the decision.  At home again, her work was done (like Jane Austen's) in the middle of family life crowding around her in the drawing room.  In 1813 the family was in London, where they were much sought after, and she met Sir Walter Scott.  When she read Waverly, the first of Walter Scott's novels, which was published anonymously, she knew from the style that it was by him.  She visited his home at Abbotsford, Scotland, in 1823, and Scott himself was at Edgeworthstown in 1825.

      During the famine years, Maria Edgeworth did all that she could for the stricken people of her district.  She died on 22nd May 1849, and is buried in the family vault in the parish graveyard.

      Her Castle Rackrent is undoubtedly the first realistic Irish novel.  It influenced the works of George Moore, JAMES JOYCE [25], and others.  She invented the regional novel, and though to some metropolitan tastes that may seem a small claim to fame, it is on her regional novels that the literature of many countries, including western America, rests.