1767–1849
Novelist, best known for her children’s stories and her novels of Irish life, such as Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee (1812)
Maria Edgeworth was the second of the twenty-two children of the extraordinary Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who was a liberal thinker of enormous energy, author, inventor, educationalist, magistrate and, as heir to a family estate in County Longford, pillar of Ireland’s Anglo-Irish landed gentry. Maria was born in her mother’s home at Blackbourton, Oxfordshire, on New Year’s Day 1767, the product of an unhappy first marriage between Richard and Anna Maria Elers. When Maria was six years old her mother died as a result of that common occupational hazard: childbirth. Her father married the beautiful Honora Sneyd within a few months and moved the whole family home to Ireland.
Two years later, at the age of eight, Maria was sent away from Edgeworthstown to be educated in England. She did not return for seven years. When Maria came back in 1782, Honora had died of consumption and had been quickly replaced as the mistress of Edgeworthstown by her sister, Elizabeth Sneyd.
Maria’s home was now an Irish estate where her father was a mini-king. Surrounded by his children, extended family (including two more unmarried Sneyd sisters), servants and tenants, Maria’s father ruled as a benevolent dictator. In sharp contrast to the attitudes of most Anglo-Irish landlords of the day, however, Richard felt a responsibility toward his tenants. He ignored the Penal Laws to grant security of tenure to tenants who improved their land. Equally unconventionally, he adhered to the principles of the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau in relation to the education of his family. This involved encouraging the child to enjoy his or her learning experiences, and teaching the child to be self-sufficient and resourceful. Richard was universally adored by the locals, by his wife and children, but most of all by Maria, who spent her life striving to live up to his high expectations.
In this, Maria made a good start. Although shy, very short and so plain that she avoided mirrors, Maria’s personal qualities were fine. She was intelligent, capable, energetic, generous, very keen to do good and, above all, dutiful. She had plenty of initiative, but was also willing to be guided by her incurably didactic father. By the age of just fifteen, Maria was managing the accounts at Edgeworthstown House and acting as her father’s secretary in his many improving and inventive projects. In a house where there was a seemingly never-ending procession of stepmothers, Maria became the most reliable mother figure of all.
If working for her father was Maria’s day job, her night-time occupation and real passion was always writing. Apart from completing compositions that her father set and corrected for her, she also wrote incessantly for the amusement and edification of her ever-increasing tribe of half-siblings – stories with a simple moral, such as ‘Simple Susan’ and ‘Lazy Lawrence’. Her work always had to pass muster with her father – it had to carry the right Edgeworthian message, demonstrating the beauties of industry, economy and punctuality.
For Maria the 1790s were a busy time. When she was twenty-eight she published her first work, Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), which, startlingly, advocated education for girls. Maria’s next book, The Parent’s Assistant (1796), was directly lifted from those night-time scribblings of her teens and twenties. Following this she collaborated with her father on Practical Education (1798), a treatise on education based on Rousseau’s writings, which explored modern childcare methods, such as the relevance of play and the importance of the natural impulses of the child. It was her work on educational issues that made Maria’s name in the USA, a rare feat for a female writer at that time.
The year of rebellion, 1798, was traumatic and financially devastating for many landowning families, but the Edgeworths emerged totally unscathed. Maria later described it as ‘a mixture of the ridiculous and the horrid’. True, they had to flee their house as the rebels marched on Edgeworthstown, and true, they narrowly escaped being part of a party that was subsequently blown to pieces, but their popularity with the locals stood them in good stead and the rebels left their property alone. Amazingly, the only damage sustained was a few broken windows.
A more important event in the family circle was the death of stepmother, Elizabeth Sneyd, of consumption; she left nine children. Maria’s father responded to this tragedy by making a speedy fourth marriage, this time to the daughter of a County Louth clergyman. Maria, who was older than her new stepmother, took on the jobs of caring for her many orphaned siblings, continuing estate business – and writing prolifically.
Maria’s fame grew in the years between 1800 and 1814. She published thirteen major works in some twenty-two volumes, including novels, plays for children and collections of essays and moral tales. Her most popular novel, Castle Rackrent, published the same year as the Act of Union (1800), dealt with the mismanagement of estates by Ascendancy landlords. Maria had an eye for detail and had witnessed first-hand the abuses of the landlord system, which compared unfavourably with her father’s way of doing business. Castle Rackrent was original – Maria was the first to choose this subject matter and she was the first to report ‘Irishness’ accurately in terms of speech and habits. Based as it was on her personal knowledge of the Edgeworthstown tenants and locals, it had the ring of authenticity about it. Castle Rackrent is more humorous and less didactic than most of her other work; it is no surprise that she published it independently, anonymously and without the collaboration – or interference – of her beloved ‘critic, partner, father, friend’.
In 1802 Maria travelled to England, France, Belgium and Scotland. The author of seven highly regarded and widely read books, she was now a celebrated woman of letters. Her name became a byword for intelligent conversation, yet she charmed everyone she met with her total lack of egotism. At this time, at the age of thirty-five, she also received what appears to have been her only marriage proposal – from a Swedish count and attaché to Stockholm’s royal court, a man by the name of Edelcrantz. According to the fourth and final Mrs Edgeworth, Maria loved the count but turned him down. She knew that she was essential to the family and that they simply couldn’t manage without her. So, like one of her own heroines, she put duty before love and never saw Edelcrantz again. The spurned count returned to Sweden and never married.
Back at Edgeworthstown, Maria continued to write. Irish Bulls (1802) was followed by Popular Tales (1804), Modern Griselda (1804), Leonora (1806), the first series of Tales of Fashionable Life (1809), the second series of Tales of Fashionable Life (1812) and Patronage (1814). As her fame grew steadily, she counted among her admirers Jane Austen, Lord Byron, John Ruskin and Sir Walter Scott.
In 1817 Maria’s idolised father died. Feeling that she had ‘lost more than ever daughter lost before’, she threw herself into editing his memoirs (published 1820). Her younger brother, Lovell, inherited the estate on the death of his father, but proved to be so inept that he came close to ruining the family fortune. Maria bought him out in 1826 with the money she had earned from her books and ran the estate full-time herself.
Edgeworthstown became a Mecca for visitors. Maria’s celebrity brought celebrities to see her – William Wordsworth, Sir William Herschel, Sir Humphrey Davy, William Wilberforce, all came to Edgeworthstown. In 1825 Maria received the man who was a kindred spirit and a friend until his death: Sir Walter Scott. Scott was conscious of his debt to Maria’s work on the ‘regional’ novel, and to him she was a ‘very remarkable person… the great Maria’. Lord Byron was another guest. It is difficult to know what the cheerful little middle-aged spinster and the young brooding romantic hero would have had to say to each other, but the visit was a mark of the esteem in which she was held by the literary world, not to mention by Byron himself, who did not bestow his approval lightly.
From 1834 to 1849, Maria’s published output decreased as she concentrated on running the estate, tactfully pretending all the while that her useless brother was still in charge. She rented out village houses, oversaw repairs, built a market house and modernised the local sewerage system. In 1845 the Great Famine (1845–1849) ravaged Ireland, and Maria worked strenuously to help the local peasantry. She obtained flour from American admirers and distributed food herself, soliciting her many friends and acquaintances for funds. In 1848 she came out of retirement to publish a children’s story, Orlandino, the proceeds of which went to famine relief.
On 22 May 1849, at the age of eighty-two, Maria Edgeworth died peacefully at Edgeworthstown, outliving sixteen of her twenty-one brothers and sisters. Though famous all over Europe and America, in her lifetime she earned approximately £11,000 from her writing, while her ‘brother spirit’ Sir Walter Scott made this amount in just one successful year. Maria is buried in the cemetery of St John’s Church in Edgeworthstown, which is now usually known by its older and less colonial name of Mostrim. Edgeworthstown House is now a nursing home run by the Sisters of Mercy.