Maria Edgeworth - Writing

Writing

Edgeworth's early literary efforts were melodramatic rather than realistic. She wrote many children's novels that conveyed moral lessons to their audience. 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. 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. 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.

Mr. Edgeworth, a well-known author and inventor, encouraged his daughter's career. At the height of her creative endeavors, Maria wrote, "Seriously it was to please my Father I first exerted myself to write, to please him I continued." Though the impetus for Maria's works, Mr. Edgeworth has been criticized 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.

Practical Education (1798) is a progressive work on education that combines the ideas of Locke and 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." The system attempted to "adapt both the curriculum and methods of teaching to the needs of the child; the endeavor 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." The ultimate goal of Edgeworth's system was to create an independent thinker who understands the consequences of their actions.

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. The book is a satire on Anglo-Irish landlords, before the year 1782, showing the need for more responsible management by the Irish landowning class. The story follows four generations of an Irish landholding family, the Rackrents. It is narrated by an Irish catholic worker on the estate, named Thady Quirk, and portrayed the rise of the catholic-Irish middle class.

Belinda (1801), a 3-volume work published in London, was Maria Edgeworth's first full-length novel. It dealt with love, courtship, and marriage, dramatizing the conflicts within her "own personality and environment; conflicts between reason and feeling, restraint and individual freedom, and society and free spirit." Belinda was also notable for its controversial depiction of interracial marriage between an African servant and an English farm-girl. Later editions of the novel, however, removed these sections.

Tales of Fashionable Life (1809 and 1812) is a 2-series collection of short stories which often focus on the life of a woman. 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 woman writer in England alongside Jane Austen.

Following an anti-Semitic remark in The Absentee, Edgeworth received a letter from an American Jewish woman named Rachel Mordecai in 1815 complaining about Edgeworth's depiction of Jews. In response, Harrington (1817) was written as an apology to the Jewish community. The novel was a fictitious autobiography about overcoming antisemitism and includes the first sympathetic Jewish character in an English 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. 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." 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.