Editing Maria Edgeworth (section)

==Views==
[[File:Maria Edgeworth by Adam Buck c1790.jpg|thumb|Miniature of Edgeworth by [[Adam Buck]], c. 1790]]

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".{{sfn|Fauske|Kaufman|2004|p=11}} Edgeworth used works such ''[[Castle Rackrent]]'' and ''[[Harrington (novel)|Harrington]]'' to express her feelings on controversial issues.{{cn|date=January 2022}}

===Ireland===

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 bull]]s stereotype and portrays the people of Ireland accurately in realistic, everyday settings.{{sfn|Fauske|Kaufman|2004|p=44}} This is a common theme in her works on Ireland, combating stereotypes of Irish people with accurate representations.{{sfn|Butler|1972|p=345}} 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.<ref>{{cite book|author=Elizabeth Grubgeld |title=Anglo-Irish autobiography: class, gender, and the forms of narrative|isbn=9780815630418 |pages= 139–140 |publisher=Syracuse University Press| year=2004}}</ref> Irish novelist [[Seamus Deane]] connected Edgeworth's depiction of Ireland and its relationship to Britain as being in line with wider [[Age of Enlightenment|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".<ref>{{Cite book|last=Deane|first=Seamus|url=https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184904.001.0001/acprof-9780198184904|title=Strange Country|date=25 February 1999|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-818490-4|doi=10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184904.001.0001}}</ref>

Edgeworth's writing on Ireland, especially her early Irish stories, offer an important rearticulation of [[Edmund Burke|Burkean]] local attachment and philosophical cosmopolitanism to produce an understanding of the nation as neither tightly bordered (like nations based on historical premises such as blood or inheritance) or not borderless (like those based on rational notions of universal inclusion).<ref name=Wohlgemut>{{cite journal|author=Esther Wohlgemut|title=Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity|journal=The Nineteenth Century|date=1999|volume= 39|series=SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900|issue= 4|pages=645–658|doi=10.2307/1556266|jstor=1556266}}</ref> Edgeworth used her writing to reconsider the meaning of the denomination "Anglo-Irish", and through her interrogation she reinterpreted both cosmopolitan and national definitions of belonging so as to reconstitute "Anglo-Irish" less as a category than as an ongoing mediation between borders.<ref name=Wohlgemut /> In Edgeworth's Irish novels, education is the key to both individual and national improvement, according to Edgeworth, "it is the foundation of the well-governed estate and the foundation of the well-governed nation".<ref name=Wohlgemut /> More specifically, a slow process of education instils transnational understanding in the Irish people while retaining the bonds of local attachment by which the nation is secured.<ref name=Wohlgemut /> The centrality of education not only suggests Edgeworth's wish for a rooted yet cosmopolitan or transnational judgment, but also distinguishes her writing from constructions of national identity as national character, linking her through to earlier cosmopolitan constructions of universal human subjects.<ref name=Wohlgemut /> By claiming national difference as anchored in education, culture rather than nature, Edgeworth gives to national identity a sociocultural foundation, and thereby opens a space in which change can happen.<ref name=Wohlgemut />

===Social===

Maria agreed with the [[Acts of Union 1800]], but thought that it should not be passed against the wishes of the Irish people.  Concerning education, she thought boys and girls should be educated equally and together, drawing upon [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]]'s ideas.{{sfn|Fauske|Kaufman|2004|p=37}}
She believed a woman should only marry someone who suits her in "character, temper, and understanding".{{sfn|Butler|1972|loc=p.&nbsp;187}} Becoming an old maid was preferable to an incompatible union. ''Tales of Fashionable Life'' and ''Patronage'' attacked the [[Whigs (British political party)|Whigs]]' [[Dublin Castle administration|governance of Ireland]] as corrupt and unrepresentative.{{sfn|Fauske|Kaufman|2004|p=49}}
Edgeworth strove for the self-realization of women and stressed the importance of the individual. She also wanted greater participation in politics by middle-class women. Her work ''Helen'' clearly demonstrates this point in the passage:
"Women are now so highly cultivated, and political subjects are at present of so much importance, of such high interest, to all human creatures who live together in society, you can hardly expect, Helen, that you, as a rational being, can go through the world as it now is, without forming any opinion on points of public importance. You cannot, I conceive, satisfy yourself with the common namby-pamby little missy phrase, 'ladies have nothing to do with politics'."<ref>Maria Edgeworth (1893). [https://archive.org/details/helen_1511_librivox ''Helen'']. London: George Routledge and Sons. p. 260</ref>
She sympathised with Catholics and supported gradual, though not immediate, Catholic Emancipation.{{sfn|Butler|1972|loc=p.&nbsp;451}}

===Education===
[[File:Practical Education 1798.jpg|thumb|200px|First edition title page to ''Practical Education'', 1798]]
In her 1798 book ''[[Practical Education]]'',{{sfn|Edgeworth|Lovell|1798}} she advanced a scientific approach to education, acknowledging the difficulty of doing such research which was "patiently reduced to an experimental science". She claimed no adherence to a school of thought, no new theory and purposefully avoided religion and politics. In the book's 25 chapters, she presages modern improvements to age-related educational materials, for example: in geography, maps bordered with suitable illustrated biographies; in chronology, something "besides merely committing names and dates to memory"; in chemistry, safe chemical experiments that children might undertake. She maintained that unnecessarily causing fatigue should be a great concern of educators.<ref name=Sobe /> To help illustrate the care that must be taken in teaching children and to emphasise the necessity of properly directing and managing their attentiveness, Maria Edgeworth drew several comparisons with non-European peoples.<ref name=Sobe>{{cite journal|author=Noah Sobe|title=Concentration and Civilization: Producing the Attentive Child in the Age of Enlightenment|journal=Paedagogica Historica|date=February 2010|volume=46|issue=2|pages=149–160|doi=10.1080/00309230903528520|s2cid=145231412}}</ref> In making the point that any mode of instruction that tired the attention was hurtful to children, her reasoning was that people can pay attention only to one thing at a time, and because children can appear resistant to repetition, teachers naturally should vary things.<ref name=Sobe /> However, educators should always be mindful of the fact that, "while variety relieves the mind, the objects which are varied must not all be entirely new, for novelty and variety when joined, fatigue the mind" as Edgeworth states.<ref name=Sobe /> The teaching of children needed to follow carefully considered methods, needed to evidence concern for appropriateness and proper sequencing, and needed to be guided by consideration from forms of teaching that would be empowering and enabling, not fatiguing or disabling.<ref name=Sobe /> In Edgeworth's work, the attention of the child appears as a key site for pedagogical work and interventions.<ref name=Sobe />