Maria Edgeworth Biography

Dromo's Den

EDGEWORTH, Maria (1767–1849). An Irish novelist of Irish and English life, who was born at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, but whose home was at Edgeworthstown, Ireland. Her Irish stories were the first to make a careful study of provincial life and manners. As such, they represent a distinct step in the development of fiction in English and are the progenitors of a countless family of similar productions, including Sir Walter Scott's novels of Scottish life. Sir Walter himself declares, in the preface to Waverley, that it was from her he took the idea of doing for Scotland what she had done for Ireland. Miss Edgeworth was also the first in English fiction to give careful and respectful attention to peasant life. Here, again, she proved a potent influence in modern fiction; and one of the greatest of novelists, Turgenev (q.v.), confesses (consult Anne Thackeray Ritchie's account of Maria Edgeworth in The Book of Sibyls, London, 1883) that his studies of the Russian peasant were suggested by like work of Miss Edgeworth's. The best of her stories is Castle Rackrent (1800), which first introduced English readers to Irish life. It is a picture of the reckless, devil-may-care squirearchy of pre-Union days, and is recognized by good judges as a work of rare excellence in its kind. Castle Rackrent was followed by Ennui (1809), which is a study of an absentee landed proprietor; and after Ennui came The Absentee (1812), which presents a different aspect of absenteeism. In the fourth of her Irish novels, Ormond (1817), the life of the Catholic gentry of the old Celtic stock is the theme. The didactic strain, which came to her from her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (q.v.), is more or less of a blight upon her novels of English life, though certain of these are still highly entertaining and entitle her to a secure place among English novelists of the second rank. Of such are, notably, Belinda (1804), Leonora (1806), and Helen (1834). Her didacticism, pure and simple, found expression in her first considerable effort, Practical Education (1798), written in collaboration with her father, and it was pervasive in The Parent's Assistant and other books for children, which, but for this unfortunate infusion, might to-day be as popular as they were in their author's own generation. Consult, besides The Book of Sibyls, mentioned above: Emily Lawless, Maria Edgeworth (New York, 1904), inadequate, but a critical biography convenient in its brevity; A. J. C. Hare, Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth (ib., 1895); W. D. Howells, Heroines of Fiction (ib., 1901), especially concerning the novels of English life; H. S. Krans, Irish Life in Irish Fiction (New York and London, 1903); Hill, Maria, Edgeworth and her Circle in the Days of Bonaparte and Bourbon (New York, 1910).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. VII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 468.