Editing Maria Edgeworth (section)

===Style and purpose===
[[File:Maria Edgeworth.jpg|thumb|Maria Edgeworth]]
Having come to her literary maturity at a time when the ubiquitous and unvarying stated defence of the novel was its educative power, Maria Edgeworth was among the few authors who truly espoused the educator's role.<ref name=Altieri>{{cite journal|author=Joanne Altieri|title=Style and Purpose in Maria Edgeworth's Fiction|journal=Nineteenth-Century Fiction|date=December 1968|volume= 23|issue= 3|pages=265–278|doi=10.2307/2932555 |jstor=2932555}}</ref> Her novels are morally and socially didactic in the extreme. A close analysis of the alterations which Edgeworth's style underwent when it was pressed into the service of overt didacticism should serve to illuminate the relationship between prose technique and didactic purpose in her work.<ref name=Altieri /> The convention which Maria Edgeworth has adopted and worked to death is basic to the eighteenth-century novel, but its roots lie in the drama, tracing at least to the Renaissance separation of high and low characters by their forms of speech.<ref name=Altieri /> Throughout the eighteenth-century drama, and most noticeably in the sentimental comedy, the separation becomes more and more a means of moral judgment as well as social identification.<ref name=Altieri /> The only coherent reason for Edgeworth's acceptance is the appeal of didactic moralism. In the first place, she is willing to suspend judgment wherever the service of the moral is the result.<ref name=Altieri /> Everything else may go, so long as the lesson is enforced. the lesson might be a warning against moral impropriety, as in Miss Milner's story, or against social injustice, as in ''[[The Absentee]]''.<ref name=Altieri /> Furthermore, the whole reliance on positive exemplars had been justified long before by [[Richard Steele]], who argued that the stage must supply perfect heroes since its examples are imitated and since simple natures are incapable of making the necessary deductions from the negative exemplars of satire.<ref name=Altieri />

The characteristic of Edgeworth is to connect an identifiable strain of formal realism, both philosophical and rhetorical, and therefore display an objective interest in human nature and the way it manifests itself in social custom.<ref name=Gamer>{{cite journal|author=Michael Gamer|title=Maria Edgeworth and the Romances of Real Life|journal=Novel: A Forum on Fiction|date=Spring 2001|volume= 34|issue= 2|pages=232–266|doi=10.2307/1346217|jstor=1346217}}</ref> One would expect this from Edgeworth, an author whose didacticism often has struck modern readers as either gendered liability, technical regression, or familial obligation.<ref name=Gamer /> Critics have responded to Edgeworth's eccentricities by attributing them to something more deep-seated, temperamental, and psychological.<ref name=Gamer /> In their various, often insightful representation, Edgeworth's fondness for the real, the strange, and the pedagogically useful verges on the relentless, the obsessive, and the instinctive.<ref name=Gamer /> There is an alternative literary answer to explain Edgeworth's cultural roots and ideological aims which shifts focus away from Edgeworth's familial, psychological, and cultural predicaments to the formal paradigms by which her work has been judged.<ref name=Gamer /> Rather than locating Edgeworth's early romances of real life exclusively within the traditions of eighteenth-century children's literature or domestic realism, they can be read primarily as responses to late eighteenth-century debates over the relation between history and romance, because the genre attempts to mediate between the two differentiating itself from other kinds of factual fiction.<ref name=Gamer /> Edgeworth's romances of real life operate in the same discursive field but do not attempt to traverse between self-denied antinomies.<ref name=Gamer /> In fact, they usually make the opposite claim.{{cn|date=January 2022}}

Edgeworth's repeated self-effacement needs to be seen in the context of the times, where learning in women was often disapproved of and even ridiculed, such as the satirical poem of the Rev. [[Richard Polwhele]], ''[[The Unsex'd Females]]'' (1798).{{sfn|Nash|2006|loc=[https://books.google.com/books?id=leEl8D9dfDkC&pg=PR13 Nash, J. Introduction: A Story to Tell p.xiii]}}

The Oxford English Dictionary credits Edgeworth with the earliest published usage of the word "argh."<ref>{{Cite web |title=argh, int. meanings, etymology and more {{!}} Oxford English Dictionary |url=https://www.oed.com/dictionary/argh_int?tl=true |website=Oxford English Dictionary}}</ref>