Maria Edgeworth's Writings
Title Page of Letters for Literary Ladies
Maria Edgeworth's first published work was Letters for Literary Ladies in 1795. It was a plea for the education of women that was very much ahead of its time in the ideas it expressed.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was unusual for women to receive any formal education. Edgeworth had benefited much from her father's encouragement of her own reading and writing. She thought education was just as valuable for women as for men. The book is written in the form of a series of letters.
Title Page, 1814 Edition of Castle Rackrent
Edgeworth's masterpiece, Castle Rackrent (1800) was first published anonymously. This novel is one of the few of Maria Edgeworth's books that her father did not edit. It was so popular that it was in its fifth edition almost fourteen years later. It was not until the third edition that Maria found the courage to put her name to the book. Through the voice of its narrator, the servant Thady Quirke, the novel depicts aspects of the social life of Ireland, including its class and landlord systems.
Illustration from Tales of Fashionable Life
Illustration from an 1832 edition of Tales of Fashionable Life, by Maria Edgeworth. Underneath is a quotation from Ennui. This edition was published in London by Baldwin and Cradock, Paternoster Row.
Illustration from Tales of Fashionable Life
Illustration from Tales of Fashionable Life
Illustration from an 1832 edition of Tales of Fashionable Life, by Maria Edgeworth. Underneath is a quotation from Ennui. This edition was published in London by Baldwin and Cradock, Paternoster Row.
Longer novels, like Belinda (1801), a novel about female education, and Leonora (1806) were published soon after the success of Castle Rackrent. Edgeworth's Tales of Fashionable Life was a fictional series was published in 1809 and 1812. The series was set in Ireland, England and France. It looked at life in all these countries and found similarities in their cultures.
After her father's death in 1817, Maria completed his Memoirs on his behalf. Edgeworth also wrote educational children's stories, such as Moral Tales for Young People (1801). She wrote her last novel, Helen, in 1834.
Castle Rackrent
Maria Edgeworth is sometimes described as an Irish Jane Austen and was a very well-known novelist in her time, and indeed today. She is best remembered for her masterpiece, Castle Rackrent. This is a novel about social life and customs in the Ireland at the time that it was written. It tells the story of the downfall of the Rackrent family, who own the estate on which the narrator, Thady Quirke, is a servant.
An opening extract from the novel begins:
"Having out of friendship for the family, upon whose estate, praised be Heaven! I and mine have lived rent free time out of mind, voluntarily undertaken to publish the Memoirs of the Rackrent Family, I think it my duty to say a few words, in the first place, concerning myself. My real name is Thady Quirk, though in the family I have always been known by no other than "honest Thady", afterward, in the time of Sir Murtagh, deceased, I remember to hear them calling me "old Thady," and now I've come to "poor Thady"; for I wear a long greatcoat winter and summer, which is very handy, as I never put my arms into the sleeves; they are as good as new, though come Holantide next I've had it these seven years: it holds on by a single button round my neck, cloak fashion."