45 Facts About Maria Edgeworth

Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish novelist of adults' and children's literature.

Maria Edgeworth was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe.

Maria Edgeworth held critical views on estate management, politics, and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo.

Maria Edgeworth was the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Anna Maria Edgeworth ; Maria was thus an aunt of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth.

Maria Edgeworth spent her early years with her mother's family in England, living at The Limes in Northchurch, by Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire.

Maria Edgeworth's mother died when Maria was five, and when her father married his second wife Honora Sneyd in 1773, she went with him to his estate, Edgeworthstown, in County Longford, Ireland.

Maria Edgeworth started her lifelong correspondences with learned men, mainly members of the Lunar Society.

Maria Edgeworth observed and recorded the details of daily Irish life, later drawing on this experience for her novels about the Irish.

Frances, a year younger than Maria Edgeworth, became her lifelong confidante.

Maria Edgeworth was an extremely popular author who was compared with her contemporary writers Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.

Maria Edgeworth initially earned more than them, and used her income to help her siblings.

Maria Edgeworth entered into a long correspondence with the ultra-Tory Sir Walter Scott after the publication of Waverley in 1814, in which he gratefully acknowledged her influence, and they formed a lasting friendship.

Maria Edgeworth visited him in Scotland at Abbotsford House in 1823, where he took her on a tour of the area.

Richard Maria Edgeworth was comparatively fair and forgiving in his dealings with his tenants and was actively involved in the estate's management.

Maria Edgeworth particularly worked hard to improve the living standards of the poor in Edgeworthstown.

Maria Edgeworth was an active writer to the last, with her final work, the novella Orlandino, being written and published in 1848.

Maria Edgeworth worked for the relief of the famine-stricken Irish peasants during the Great Famine.

Maria Edgeworth wrote Orlandino for the benefit of the Relieve Fund.

Maria Edgeworth punished those of her tenants who voted against her Tory preferences.

Maria Edgeworth suggested that women should be allowed to participate in events held by the academy.

Maria Edgeworth used works such Castle Rackrent and Harrington to express her feelings on controversial issues.

Academic Suvendrini Perera argued Maria Edgeworth's novels traced "the gradual anglicanization of feudal Irish society".

Maria Edgeworth's writing on Ireland, especially her early Irish stories, offer an important rearticulation of Burkean local attachment and philosophical cosmopolitanism to produce an understanding of the nation as neither tightly bordered or not borderless.

Maria 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.

Maria Edgeworth agreed with the Acts of Union 1800, but thought that it should not be passed against the wishes of the Irish people.

Maria Edgeworth believed a woman should only marry someone who suits her in "character, temper, and understanding".

Maria Edgeworth strove for the self-realization of women and stressed the importance of the individual.

Maria Edgeworth wanted greater participation in politics by middle-class women.

Maria Edgeworth claimed no adherence to a school of thought, no new theory and purposefully avoided religion and politics.

Maria Edgeworth maintained that unnecessarily causing fatigue should be a great concern of educators.

In particular, The Double Disguise signals Maria Edgeworth's turn toward realism and is considered a seminal regional narrative predating Castle Rackrent.

Maria Edgeworth's first published work was Letters for Literary Ladies in 1795.

At the height of her creative endeavours, Maria Edgeworth wrote, "Seriously it was to please my Father I first exerted myself to write, to please him I continued".

Maria 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 ultimate goal of Maria Edgeworth's system was to create an independent thinker who understands the consequences of his or her actions.

Maria Edgeworth's recollections portray not only the dissipation of his Protestant masters but, assisted by their increasing indebtedness, the rise of an Irish catholic middle class.

Maria Edgeworth chose to write a novel focused on the characters and situation, rather than moral lessons.

Maria Edgeworth's novel is set in England, a conscious choice as Edgeworth found Ireland too troubling for a fictitious work in the political climate of the 1830s.

Maria Edgeworth's novels are morally and socially didactic in the extreme.

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.

The only coherent reason for Maria Edgeworth's acceptance is the appeal of didactic moralism.

The characteristic of Maria 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.

Maria 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.

Maria Edgeworth's reputation equalled that of Fanny Burney earlier, in a time that saw a number of other female writers including Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, Hannah More and Elizabeth Inchbald.

Maria Edgeworth was certainly well received by the critics and literary figures of her time.