Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1768 – 22 May 1849) was an Anglo-Irish novelist of adult and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held critical views on estate management, politics, and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo. During the first decade of the 19th century she was one of the most widely read novelists in Britain and Ireland. Her name today is most commonly associated with Castle Rackrent, her first novel, in which she, while Anglican herself, used the voice of an Irish Catholic character to narrate the dissipation and decline of a family from her own landed Anglo-Irish class.
Maria Edgeworth was born in Black Bourton, Oxfordshire. She was the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (who eventually fathered twenty-two surviving children by four wives) and Anna Maria Edgeworth (née Elers); Maria was thus an aunt of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth. She spent her early years with her mother's family in England, living at The Limes (now known as Edgeworth House) in Northchurch, by Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. Her mother died when Maria was five, and when her father married his second wife Honora Sneyd in 1773, she went with him to his estate, Edgeworthstown, in County Longford, Ireland.
Maria was sent to Mrs. Lattafière's school in Derby after Honora fell ill in 1775. After Honora died in 1780 Maria's father married Honora's sister Elizabeth (then socially disapproved and legally forbidden from 1833 until the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907). Maria transferred to Mrs. Devis's school in London. Her father's attention became fully focused on her in 1781 when she nearly lost her sight to an eye infection. Returning home at the age of 14, she took charge of her many younger siblings and was home-tutored in law, Irish economics and politics, science, and literature by her father. She also started her lifelong correspondences with learned men, mainly members of the Lunar Society.
She became her father's assistant in managing the Edgeworthstown estate, which had become run-down during the family's 1777–1782 absence; she would live and write there for the rest of her life. With their bond strengthened, Maria and her father began a lifelong academic collaboration "of which she was the more able and nimble mind". Present at Edgeworthstown was an extended family, servants and tenants. She observed and recorded the details of daily Irish life, later drawing on this experience for her novels about the Irish. She also mixed with the Anglo-Irish gentry, particularly Kitty Pakenham (later the wife of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington), Lady Moira, and her aunt Margaret Ruxton of Blackcastle. Margaret supplied her with the novels of Ann Radcliffe and William Godwin and encouraged her in her writing.
In 1798 Richard married Frances Beaufort, daughter of Daniel Augustus Beaufort, who instigated the idea of travelling to England and the European continent. Frances, a year younger than Maria, became her lifelong confidante. The family travelled first to London in 1799.
In 1802 the Edgeworths toured The Midlands. They then travelled to Continental France, first to Brussels and then to France (during the Peace of Amiens, a brief lull in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars). They met all the notables, and Maria received a marriage proposal from a Swedish courtier, Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz. Her letter on the subject seems very cool, but her stepmother assures us in the Augustus Hare Life and Letters that Maria loved him very much and did not get over the affair quickly. They came home to Ireland in 1803 on the eve of the resumption of the wars and Maria returned to writing. Tales of Fashionable Life, The Absentee and Ormond are novels of Irish life. Edgeworth was an extremely popular author who was compared with her contemporary writers Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. She initially earned more than them, and used her income to help her siblings.
On a visit to London in 1813, where she was received as a literary lion, Maria met Lord Byron (whom she disliked) and Humphry Davy. She entered into a long correspondence with the ultra-Tory Sir Walter Scott after the publication of Waverley in 1814, in which he gratefully acknowledged her influence, and they formed a lasting friendship. She visited him in Scotland at Abbotsford House in 1823, where he took her on a tour of the area. The next year, Sir Walter visited Edgeworthstown. When passing through the village, one of the party wrote, "We found neither mud hovels nor naked peasantry, but snug cottages and smiles all about". A counter view was provided by another visitor who stated that the residents of Edgeworthstown treated Edgeworth with contempt, refusing even to feign politeness.
Richard Edgeworth was comparatively fair and forgiving in his dealings with his tenants and was actively involved in the estate's management. After debating the issue with the economist David Ricardo, Maria came to believe that better management and the further application of science to agriculture would raise food production and lower prices. Both Richard and Maria were also in favour of Catholic Emancipation, enfranchisement for Catholics without property restrictions (although he believed it was against his own interest), agricultural reform and increased educational opportunities for women. She particularly worked hard to improve the living standards of the poor in Edgeworthstown. In trying to improve conditions in the village she provided schools for the local children of all denominations.
After her father's death in 1817 she edited his memoirs, and extended them with her biographical comments. She was an active writer to the last, with her final work, the novella Orlandino, being written and published in 1848.
She worked for the relief of the famine-stricken Irish peasants during the Great Famine. She wrote Orlandino for the benefit of the Relieve Fund. Her letters to the Quaker Relief Committee provide a vivid account of the desperate plight facing the tenants in Edgeworthstown, the extreme conditions under which they lived, and the struggle to obtain whatever aid and assistance she could to alleviate their plight. Through her efforts she received gifts for the poor from America.
During the Irish Famine Edgeworth insisted that only those of her tenants who had paid their rent in full would receive relief. Edgeworth also punished those of her tenants who voted against her Tory preferences.
With the election of William Rowan Hamilton to president of the Royal Irish Academy, Maria became a dominant source of advice for Hamilton, particularly on the issue of literature in Ireland. She suggested that women should be allowed to participate in events held by the academy. For her guidance and help, Hamilton made Edgeworth an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1837, following in the footsteps of Louisa Beaufort, a former member of the academy and a relative of hers.
After a visit to see her relations in Trim, Maria, now in her eighties, began to feel heart pains and died suddenly of a heart attack in Edgeworthstown on 22 May 1849.
Though Maria Edgeworth spent most of her childhood in England, her life in Ireland had a profound impact on both her thinking and views on Irish culture. Fauske and Kaufman conclude, "[She] used her fiction to address the inherent problems of acts delineated by religious, national, racial, class based, sexual, and gendered identities". Edgeworth used works such Castle Rackrent and Harrington to express her feelings on controversial issues.
In her works, Edgeworth created a nostalgic and imagined Irish past in an attempt to celebrate the culture of Ireland. Academic Suvendrini Perera argued Edgeworth's novels traced "the gradual anglicanization of feudal Irish society". Edgeworth's goal in her works was to show the Irish as equal to the British, and therefore warranting an equal, though not separate, status. Essay on Irish Bulls rejects the Irish bulls stereotype and portrays the people of Ireland accurately in realistic, everyday settings. This is a common theme in her works on Ireland, combating stereotypes of Irish people with accurate representations. In her works, Edgeworth also placed a special focus on the linguistic differences between Irish and British culture, attempting to showcase the dynamism and intricacies of Irish society. Irish novelist Seamus Deane connected Edgeworth's depiction of Ireland and its relationship to Britain as being in line with wider Enlightenment ideals, noting that Edgeworth "was not the first novelist to have chosen Ireland as her ‘scene’; but she was the first to realize that there was, within it, a missionary opportunity to convert it to Enlightenment faith and rescue it from its ‘romantic’ conditions".