Editing Maria Edgeworth (section)

==Work==
[[File:Library at Edgeworthstown House 1888.jpg|thumb|Library at Edgeworthstown House 1888]]
Edgeworth's early literary efforts have often been considered melodramatic rather than realistic. Recent scholarship,<ref>Twomey, Ryan ''"The Child is Father of the Man": Importance of Juvenilia in the Development of the Author''. Netherlands: Hes & De Graaf, 2012,</ref> however, has uncovered the importance of Edgeworth's previously unpublished [[juvenilia]] manuscript, ''The Double Disguise'' (1786).<ref>Maria Edgeworth (2014). ''The Double Disguise''. Ed. Christine Alexander Ryan Twomey. Sydney: Juvenilia Press.</ref> In particular, ''The Double Disguise'' signals Edgeworth's turn toward realism and is now considered a seminal regional narrative predating ''[[Castle Rackrent]]'' (1800). In addition, Edgeworth wrote many children's novels that conveyed moral lessons to their audience (often in partnership with her friend [[Louise Swanton Belloc]], a French writer, translator, and advocate for the education of women and children, whose many translations of Edgeworth's works were largely responsible for her popularity in France).<ref name="Beeton">{{cite book|author=Samuel Orchart Beeton|title=Beeton's Modern European Celebrities: A Biography of Continental Men and Women of Note|date=1874|publisher=Ward, Locke and Tyler|location=London|page=32|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BHIBAAAAQAAJ}}</ref><ref name="Quérard">{{cite book|author=Joseph-Marie Quérard|title=La littérature française contemporaine: XIXe siècle|date=1842|publisher=Daguin Frères|location=Paris|pages=[https://archive.org/details/lalittraturefra12maurgoog/page/n259 254]–56| volume =1|url=https://archive.org/details/lalittraturefra12maurgoog|quote=petite manuel de morale elementaire belloc.}}</ref><ref name="Janus">{{cite web|author=Anne-Louise Swanton Belloc|title=Papers of Louise Swanton Belloc|url=http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0271%2FGCPP%20Parkes%2017a|website=Janus (Cambridge University Archives)|publisher=Cambridge University|location=Personal Papers of Bessie Rayner Parkes|format=Journals, biographical materials, family papers, and correspondence}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|author=John Chapple|title=Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years|date=1997|publisher=Manchester UP|location=Manchester|isbn=0-7190-2550-8|page=[https://archive.org/details/elizabethgaskell0000chap/page/191 191]|url=https://archive.org/details/elizabethgaskell0000chap|url-access=registration}}</ref> One of her schoolgirl novels features a [[villain]] who wore a mask made from the skin of a dead man's face. Edgeworth's first published work was ''[[Letters for Literary Ladies]]'' in 1795. This work was a response to Thomas Day's, a member of the Lunar Society, belief that women should not be authors or taught to think.<ref>{{Citation |last=Keown |first=Edwina |title=Edgeworth, Maria |date=2011-02-01 |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/edgeworth-maria-a2882 |work=Dictionary of Irish Biography |editor-last=Quinn |editor-first=James |access-date=2023-05-25 |publisher=Royal Irish Academy |language=en |doi=10.3318/dib.002882.v2}}</ref> Her work, "An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification" (1795) is written for a female audience in which she convinces women that the fair sex is endowed with an art of self-justification and women should use their gifts to continually challenge the force and power of men, especially their husbands, with wit and intelligence. It humorously and satirically explores the feminine argumentative method.<ref name="Donawerth 2002"/> This was followed in 1796 by her first children's book, ''[[The Parent's Assistant]]'', which included Edgeworth's celebrated short story "[[The Purple Jar]]". ''The Parent's Assistant'' was influenced by her father's work and perspectives on children's education.<ref name=dona2/>

Mr. Edgeworth, a well-known author and inventor, encouraged his daughter's career. At the height of her creative endeavours, Maria wrote, "Seriously it was to please my Father I first exerted myself to write, to please him I continued".{{sfn|Harden|1984|p=1}} Though the impetus for Maria's works, Mr. Edgeworth has been criticised for his insistence on approving and editing her work. The tales in ''The Parent's Assistant'' were approved by her father before he would allow them to be read to her younger siblings. It is speculated that her stepmother and siblings also helped in the editing process of Edgeworth's work.<ref>{{cite web| url = https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/making-and-measuring-education-at-home/| title = Making and Measuring Education at Home: From Maria Edgeworth to the Kid Interrupting Your Attempt to Read These Words| last = Etskovitz| first = Joani| date = 6 May 2020| website = Los Angeles Review of Books| access-date = 18 March 2023}}</ref>

''[[Practical Education]]'' (1798)<ref group=notes>Ostensibly a collaborative project between father and daughter, but in reality a family project {{harv|Nash|2006|p=59}}.</ref> is a progressive work on education that combines the ideas of [[John Locke|Locke]] and [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]] with scientific inquiry. Edgeworth asserts that "learning should be a positive experience and that the discipline of education is more important during the formative years than the acquisition of knowledge".{{sfn|Harden|1984|p=26}} The system attempted to "adapt both the curriculum and methods of teaching to the needs of the child; the endeavour to explain moral habits and the learning process through associationism; and most important, the effort to entrust the child with the responsibility for his own mental culture".{{sfn|Harden|1984|p=27}} The ultimate goal of Edgeworth's system was to create an independent thinker who understands the consequences of his or her actions.{{cn|date=January 2022}}

Her first novel, ''[[Castle Rackrent]]'' (1800) was written and submitted for anonymous publication in 1800 without her father's knowledge. It was an immediate success and firmly established Edgeworth's appeal.<ref name=boy/> Set prior to the securing of Irish [[Constitution of 1782|legislative independence in 1782]], the novel is a satire on the corruption and incompetence of Ireland's Protestant gentry. Inspired by a chronicle of Edgeworth's own family,<ref>{{Cite web |date=2017-12-19 |title=Maria Edgeworth's 250th anniversary |url=https://www.ria.ie/news/dictionary-irish-biography-public-engagement/maria-edgeworths-250th-anniversary |access-date=2021-08-13 |website=Royal Irish Academy |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Kirkpatrick |first=Kathryn |date=July 1996 |title="Going to Law about That Jointure": Women and Property in "Castle Rackrent" |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25513040 |journal=The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies |volume=22 |issue=1 |pages=21–29 |jstor=25513040}}</ref> the story of four generations of an [[Protestant Ascendancy|Ascendancy]] family is narrated by a loyal Catholic retainer, their estate steward, Thady Quirk. His recollections portray not only the dissipation of his Protestant masters but also, assisted by their increasing indebtedness, the rise of an Irish catholic middle class.<ref name=narr>RIA Dictionary of Irish Biography, 2009. p. 577</ref> Before its publication, an introduction, glossary and footnotes, written in the voice of an English narrator, were added in effort to offset the danger of the book blunting English enthusiasm for the [[Act of Union 1800]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Twomey |first=Ryan. |title=Preface to Castle Rackrent |publisher=New York, Norton Critical Edition |year=2014 |isbn=978-0-393-92241-7}}</ref>

''[[Belinda (Edgeworth novel)|Belinda]]'' (1801), a 3-volume work published in London, was Maria Edgeworth's first full-length novel. It dealt with love, courtship, and marriage, dramatising the conflicts within her "own personality and environment; conflicts between reason and feeling, restraint and individual freedom, and society and free spirit".{{sfn|Harden|1984|p=50}} ''Belinda'' was also notable for its controversial depiction of interracial marriage between a [[Black people|Black]] servant and an English farmgirl. Later editions of the novel, however, removed these sections.<ref group=notes>See Introduction to World Classics edition of ''Belinda'', page xxvii, written by Kathryn Kirkpatrick: "In the 1810 edition of her novel Edgeworth effectively rewrote her representation of romantic relationships between English women and West Indian men, both Creole and African. She felt her novel so changed, she described it to her aunt as 'a twice told tale'. And that she retold her story to omit even the possibility of unions between English women and West Indian men is significant. For it suggests that in order for Belinda to merit inclusion in a series defining the British novel, Edgeworth had to make her colonial characters less visible, less integrated socially into English society. And she certainly had to banish the spectre of inter-racial marriage". Edgeworth herself said she removed the Juba-Lucy interracial marriage "because my father has great delicacies and scruples of conscience about encouraging such marriage".</ref>

''Tales of Fashionable Life'' (1809 and 1812) is a 2-series collection of short stories which often focus on the life of a woman.{{sfn|McCormack |2015}} The second series was particularly well received in England, making her the most commercially successful novelist of her age. After this, Edgeworth was regarded as the preeminent female writer in England alongside Jane Austen.{{sfn|McCormack |2015}}

Following an anti-Semitic remark in ''The Absentee'', Edgeworth received a letter from an American Jewish woman named [[Rachel Mordecai Lazarus|Rachel Mordecai]] in 1815 complaining about Edgeworth's depiction of Jewish characters.{{sfn|Harden|1984|p=88}} As an amende honorable, she wrote [[Harrington (novel)|''Harrington'']] (1817),<ref>Saunders, Antonia (2024). An Unpublished Letter from Maria Edgeworth to Her Cousin and Aunt, During a Period of Grief at the Death of Her Father, and after The Publication of Harrington (1817). Notes and Queries, 71(4) pp. 452–456.</ref> a fictitious autobiography of a young English gentleman whose is cured of his youthful prejudices by contact--in one of the first sympathetic Jewish characters in an English novel--{{sfn|Harden|1984|p=90}} with various Jewish characters, particularly a young woman. Set between the passing of the [[Jewish Naturalisation Act 1753]] and the [[Gordon Riots]] of 1780, it draws parallels between the discrimination against Jews and the disabilities suffered by Catholics in Ireland.{{sfn|Harden|1984|p=92}}

''[[Helen (novel)|Helen]]'' (1834) is Maria Edgeworth's final novel, the only one she wrote after her father's death. She chose to write a novel focused on the characters and situation, rather than moral lessons.{{sfn|McCormack |2015}} In a letter to her publisher, Maria wrote, "I have been reproached for making ''my moral'' in some stories too prominent. I am sensible of the inconvenience of this both to reader and writer & have taken much pains to avoid it in ''Helen''".{{sfn|McCormack |2015}} Her novel is also set in England, a conscious choice as Edgeworth found Ireland too troubling for a fictitious work in the political climate of the 1830s.{{sfn|McCormack |2015}}

===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>

===List of published works===
{{colbegin}}
A partial list of published works:{{sfn|Edgeworth|2013}}
*''Letters for Literary Ladies'' – 1795; [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/edgeworth/ladies/ladies.html Second Edition] – 1798
**includes: ''[[An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification]]'' – 1795
*''[[The Parent's Assistant]]'' – 1796
*''[[Practical Education]]'' – 1798 (2 vols; collaborated with her father, [[Richard Lovell Edgeworth]] and step-mother, [[Honora Sneyd]])
*''[[Castle Rackrent]]'' – 1800 (novel)
*{{cite book |last=Edgeworth |first=Maria |title=Early Lessons |date=1801 |publisher=Johnson |location=London |edition=1st |url=http://hockliffe.dmu.ac.uk/items/0098.html}}
*''Moral Tales'' – 1801
*''[[Belinda (Edgeworth novel)|Belinda]]'' – 1801 (novel)
*''The Mental Thermometer'' – 1801
*''Essay on Irish Bulls'' – 1802 (political, collaborated with her father)
*''Popular Tales'' – 1804
*''[[The Modern Griselda]]'' – 1804
*''Moral Tales for Young People'' – 1805 (6 vols)
*''[[Leonora (novel)|Leonora]]'' – 1806 (written during the French excursion)
*''Essays in Professional Education'' – 1809
*''Tales of Fashionable Life'' – 1809 and 1812 (2 collections of stories, the second of which includes ''The Absentee'')
*''[[Ennui (novel)|Ennui]]'' – 1809 (novel)
*''[[The Absentee]]'' – 1812 (novel)
*''[[Patronage (novel)|Patronage]]'' – 1814 (novel)
*''[[Harrington (novel)|Harrington]]'' – 1817 (novel)
*''[[Ormond (novel)|Ormond]]'' – 1817 (novel)
*''Comic Dramas'' – 1817
*''Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth'' – 1820 (edited her father's memoirs)
*''Rosamond: A Sequel to Early Lessons'' – 1821
*''Frank: A Sequel to Frank in Early Lessons'' – 1822
*''Tomorrow'' – 1823 (novel)
*''Harry and Lucy concluded'' – 1825 (novel)
*''[[Helen (novel)|Helen]]'' – 1834 (novel)
*''Orlandino'' – 1848 ([[Temperance movement|temperance]] novel)

Also:
* {{cite journal |last1=Edgeworth |first1=Maria |date=1820 |title=RL Edgeworth Esq |journal=The Annual Register |volume=Part II |pages=1215–1223 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5VE4AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA1215 |ref=none}}
* {{cite book |last1=Edgeworth |first1=Maria |title=Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth (Illustrated) |publisher=Delphi Classics |date=2013 |url={{Google books|ID0bAgAAQBAJ|plainurl=yes}}}}
* {{cite journal|ref=none |last1=Hall |first1=S. C. |title=Edgeworthstown: Memories of Maria Edgeworth |journal=Living Age| date=1849 |volume=22 |pages=320–329 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ipo2AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA320 |access-date=30 March 2015 }}
{{colend}}