Edgeworth, Maria

A prolific writer of children’s literature, educational works, and popular fiction, Maria Edgeworth was one of the most successful authors of the early nineteenth century. She made a name for herself publishing educational texts for children based on her involvement in the schooling of her many half-brothers and -sisters. Her family home in Co. Longford, Ireland, provided the inspiration for many of her fictions, and her “Irish” novels published between 1800 and 1817 pioneered the use of Irish settings and subject matter, and became a central reference point for writers of national, regional, and historical fiction in the Romantic period. In her heyday, Edgeworth commanded an acclaim rivaling, if not exceeding, that of her near-contemporaries, Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. Although considered a minor writer for much of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Edgeworth has since assumed a key position in Romantic and Irish literary studies, largely due to feminist literary scholarship in the 1970s, which recovered her works to view.