Editing Maria Edgeworth (section)

===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 />