Maria Edgeworth - Biography and Works, one of the eminent intellectuals in Irish history. For more than a quarter-century, she upheld her high standards as an educationist and writer on issues of class, race, and gender. Outspoken and small in stature, she was never short on grace and wit. Maria Edgeworth was born on January 1, 1768, at her maternal grandfather’s home in Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, England. Her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817), an Anglo-Irish writer, scientist, inventor, and educationist, would marry four times and have twenty-four children. Her mother, Anna Maria Elers (1743-1773), died when Maria was six, attended by Dr. Darwin, Charles Darwin's father, who tried in vain to save her. The beautiful Honora Sneyd (d. 1780) became Maria's first stepmother.
Under the ever-watchful eye of her father, a follower of progressive educational ideas, his high hopes for her led her to attend Mrs. Lattafi鑢e’s school in Derby until 1780, studying subjects including dancing and French, then moving on to Mrs. Davis’s school in Upper Wimpole Street, London. She loved telling stories in the dorms and wrote many for her siblings, assisting in their education and upbringing. A fast learner and voracious reader, her eyes troubled her with inflammation at times. When her mother died, she, as the eldest, became very close to her father, who gave her writing assignments from a young age and profoundly influenced her work, insisting on reading and editing most of what she produced while he was alive. It is often said that he was too heavy-handed and interfering, that the moral tone and preachment she sometimes affected were not genuinely hers and stunted her expression.
Honora Sneyd died in 1780, and Edgeworth's father remarried her sister Elizabeth within months. In 1782, the ever-growing Edgeworth family traveled to their estate in Edgeworthstown, just north of Dublin. There she would live among the landed gentry for most of her life, assisting her father with secretarial and accounting duties in running his estates, working in their massive book-lined library. She would ride her cob pony alongside him on his horse while he went on his rounds of the fields, gathering information through keen observation and intimate knowledge of the locals. Edgeworth became well-acquainted with the Irish tenants and peasant class, and the majority of her stories centered on them, treating them with sincere dignity in realistic but fictional characters. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 led to some memorable events in Edgeworth's life; the young girl and her extensive family escaped rebels who were working their way towards Dublin, her father took up arms to defend Longworth from the French, and they were driven from their home to take shelter at a nearby inn. During this time, Edgeworth collaborated with her progressive-thinking father to write Essays on Practical Education, which appeared in 1798. Her father would enter the Irish House of Commons the same year. Margaret Ruxton, one of Edgeworth's aunts, became a close confidant. She would write to her of their adventures from the inn where they had taken refuge during the rebellion.
One of Edgeworth's first publications was her feminist essay Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), a plea for reform in women's education. In 1802, the always sensible Maria and her father traveled to France, during which M. Edelcrantz courted her, though her loyalty to Ireland kept them from marrying.
The title page of her first and most famous Irish tale, Castle Rackrent (1800), which she first published anonymously, says "an Hibernian Tale. Taken from facts, and from the manners of the Irish squires, before the year 1782." Edgeworth uses a rarely-used device of a narrator telling the tale of the decline of a fictional family of profligate landlords. King George III, after reading it, said, "I know something now of my Irish subjects." It is said that the seeming class bias against the landlords of Maria's Irish tales, especially absentee ones, is purely accidental. She was not a radical as one might infer from Rackrent.
Belinda (1802), Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), Leonora (1806), Tales of Fashionable Life (1809 and 1812), Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812), Patronage (1814), her longest and most involved novel with political intrigue and the quest for a universal language, and Ormond (1817), about pre-revolutionary France, closely followed the success of Rackrent. Upon her father’s death in 1817, she started to edit his memoirs, adding biographical comments.
Edgeworth was becoming known in fashionable literary and social circles, receiving mostly favorable reviews though also criticized for being too didactic and moralistic, with a tinge of colonialism. She was a pioneer of social realism and historical tales, influencing younger writers like Turgenev with her mostly hero-less tales. During her second visit to Paris in 1820, she was warmly received and counted among her friends Jeremy Bentham, Lord Byron, Stendhal, Talleyrand, her publisher J. G. Lockhart, Etienne Dumont, and others. In 1825, she visited Abbotsford in Scotland. There is a stone at Tyhmer’s Waterfall where it is said Maria visited and which bears the name "Edgeworth Stone." After her father’s death, Edgeworth became more politically conservative in her views and turned to writing children’s stories again, including Rosamond, a sequel (1821). Helen (1834) was her last full-length novel.
Wanting to promote literature in Ireland, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, president of the Royal Irish Academy, sought Edgeworth’s advice. One of her main points of reform was that women be included in their evening parties. She was made an honorary member of the academy on June 13, 1842.
The first signs of famine in Ireland started in 1845, and Edgeworth assisted in the support of the sick and destitute, working strenuously for the relief of the famine-stricken Irish peasants, though she and her own family barely survived. Her favorite stepsister Fanny died in 1848. At home on May 22, 1849, after complaints of heart pains, Maria Edgeworth died suddenly. She is buried in the family tomb at St. John’s Church, Edgeworthstown, Longford, Ireland. Edgeworth house is now a nursing home run by the Sisters of Mercy.
"I have written the Sublime - the Beautiful I leave to Maria." ~ Richard Lovell Edgeworth
Biography written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc 2005. All Rights Reserved.
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