ABSTRACT
Maria Edgeworth, daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his first wife, Anna Maria Elers, was born in Hare Hatch, Berkshire, in 1768. Husband to four successive wives and father of twenty-two children, Edgeworth père had an overarching influence on his daughter’s life, as well as her illustrious literary career. Of respectable Anglo-Irish stock, Edgeworth was an educator, scientist, politician, and landlord. An inventor with considerable scientific talent (he devised an early form of the telegraph and significantly improved carriage design amongst other innovations), the father was ultimately outshone by his daughter’s lasting legacy as a novelist. With the exception of childhood years in England which included some stints in boarding schools, Maria lived most of her life on her father’s Irish estate in Edgeworthstown, County Longford, surrounded by her extensive family. Even though biographers and literary critics have rightly judged the father’s didactic influence on the daughter’s writings to be more deleterious than beneficial to her craft as a novelist, Maria always considered her father the primary interlocutor for her literary efforts. While she died only in 1849, her most productive years were roughly the two decades until 1817, when her father died. In this period she produced most of the novels, tales, and volumes of short fiction for which she is known. Edgeworth’s novels include Castle Rackrent (1800), Belinda (1801), The Modern Griselda (1805), Leonora (1806), Ennui (1809), Patronage (1814), Harrington and Ormond (1817), Helen (1834), and Orlandino (1848). There were also volumes of short didactic fiction intended for disparate audiences such as children, adolescents, the peasantry, and the aristocracy. These were published as follows: The Parent’s Assistant (1796; in 6 volumes by 1800), Moral Tales (1801, 3 volumes), Popular Tales (1804, 3 volumes), and Tales of Fashionable Life (volumes 1–3, 1809, and volumes 4–5, 1812). In addition, Edgeworth wrote several educational tracts such as Practical Education, co-authored with her father in 1798.
