Acclaimed as one of the most important novelists of the contemporary scene in the early 19th century, Maria Edgeworth's fame extended not only to Britain but also to France and Switzerland, where her works were translated and admired. This fame contrasts with her almost total obscurity outside academic circles in Ireland today - obscurity that is all the more regrettable since Edgeworth's writing remains a rich source of illumination and insight into the complexities of life in Ireland.
If the novels of Jane Austen, with which we are currently familiar by means of numerous cinema and television adaptations, are characterised by a disingenuous absence of controversy and debate, Edgeworth's fictions have the power to startle by virtue of their insistent engagement with reality. Visitors to Edgeworthstown House in Co Longford, Maria's home from the age of 15 until her death aged 86 in 1849, describe a house which reflected the enthusiastic experimentalism of her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. His optimistic and enlightened views communicated themselves to his daughter, and decisively shaped her pioneering fictions. The library at Edgeworthstown was the room in which the family gathered. It possessed the quality of a workshop, where the various members of this large family (R.L. Edgeworth had 22 children by four wives) engaged not only in literary and intellectual pursuits, but also in carpentry and the construction of mechanical devices of varying degrees of usefulness.
When R.L. Edgeworth returned from England in 1782 to take up the personal management of his estate, he was influenced not only by Enlightenment thinking, but also by personal contacts established with a group of progressive professionals and industrialists based in the Birmingham area, which met once a month and was known as the Lunar Circle. R.L. Edgeworth was determined to make a practical difference as the owner of an Irish estate, in a manner that combined the recognition of things as they were, with a confidence in human ability to effect change. Maria Edgeworth's fiction reflects in equal proportions this fascination with reality and the drive towards its transformation.
One of the striking and unique aspects of her work is its enthusiasm for documenting life in its kaleidoscopic variety. This feature of all her work is particularly apparent in her series of Popular Tales, short fictions aimed at the rising middle classes. Although these tales have been dismissed as didactic, they give an insight into a writer who regarded the concerns of small farmers and trades-people as equally important subjects for fiction as the marital ambitions of well-born young women.
While it was considered laudable for a woman of Edgeworth's class and background to address herself to the improvement and instruction of both children and the lettered populace, she did not escape criticism for her bold representations of private and public life. Following the publication of her lengthy novel, Patronage (1813), one of her more conservative reviewers took Edgeworth to task for what he perceived as her unfounded criticisms of the conduct of public life in England.
Belinda (1802), a novel which on one level approximates the novel of "female education" typified by Austen's work, contained several plot details which shocked genteel readers. The heroine's older mentor lives in a state of estrangement from her husband and conceals an addiction to opium, while one of her less respectable friends recounts dressing as a man in order to gain access to the House of Commons, and then fighting a duel - also in men's clothes. The detail that caused the most discomfort, however, was a relatively minor episode in which a black servant, arrived from the British Caribbean, meets and marries a white woman. Subsequent editions of this novel contained awkward revisions to remove the offence.
Edgeworth wrote in 1810: "My father says that gentlemen have horrors upon this subject, and would draw conclusions very unfavourable to a female writer who appeared to recommend such unions; as I do not understand the subject, I trust to his better judgment."
Edgeworth's ground-breaking use of vernacular Irish speech derives from her special interest in the representation of life in all its variety. Castle Rackrent (1800) remains for this reason her best-known work, and many would say deservedly so. At the time of its publication Edgeworth was known as the author of Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), a multi-layered defence of women's right to education, and Practical Education (1798), a work written in partnership with her father which presented a distinctly modern view of childhood development. Much of it remains current today.
Neither of these publications suggested the anarchic imagination which characterises Castle Rackrent. Twentieth-century acclaim for this uncategorisable fiction is, however, at odds with Edgeworth's own estimation of it. In creating the voice of Thady Quirk, the Rackrents' "loyal" servant who narrates the story of the family's decline, Edgeworth felt she was doing no more than transcribing an oral entertainment with which she had amused her extended family.
The anonymous publication of the first edition reflected this attitude. Castle Rackrent eventually reached its readership accompanied by a battery of explanatory devices: a preface, an "Advertisement to the English Reader", a glossary and footnotes. Some of this editorial matter is intended to enhance the text's "usefulness" as a form of documentary; some attempts to control or circumscribe the possibilities for interpretation. Both these intentions are in keeping with Edgeworth's aims in fiction: the representation of reality was in her view insufficient (and in any case meaningless because of the endlessly proliferating nature of reality) without a vision of its improvement. Traditionally this has been described as a stifling didacticism which mars Edgeworth's work; it could, however, be more fruitfully recognised as a challenge to the writer's creative imagination.
Edgeworth's engagement with the dilemmas of history, identity and authority in Ireland, coupled with her optimistic Enlightenment perspective, produced a fiction which is unmistakably in the author's own voice but which also reflects the limitations of strict realism in an Irish cultural context. In Ennui, or The Memoirs of the Earl of Glenthorn (1809), to cite just one example, the earl of the title discovers that following a mix-up at birth he is in fact the son of a blacksmith.
In a parodic reversal of revolution, the earl by birth and the earl by education attempt to convince each other of their superior claims to land and power. Eventually relinquishing his estates, the former earl seizes the opportunity to reinvent his identity and recreates himself as a hardworking professional lawyer, before having his estates eventually returned to him. Reformed, re-educated and altogether shorn of the traditional baggage of power, the earl represents a fantasy of legitimated authority. The failure, by contrast, of the true-born earl to adapt to his sudden change of station has been read as Edgeworth's insistence on the necessity for Ascendancy leadership. This is a common misreading of the tale, which ultimately proposes that education, not race or religion, determines fitness to govern.
Edgeworth's somewhat puzzled response to the " horrors" which gentlemen had on the subject of racial inter-marriage is in keeping with her adherence to a rational spirit of Enlightenment which was fading rapidly in the romantic and increasingly nationalist culture of the 19th century. Although she was acknowledged as the pioneer of a fiction that addressed the shape-shifting entity called Ireland, Edgeworth's alternative histories found little favour in an era in which the collapse of Protestant power and the concomitant rise of the Catholic nation were the dominant narratives. Her twin aims of confronting reality and imagining its creative reconstruction are, however, not only an indication of her original talent, but are also gifts of vision with relevance to our own times.
Cliona O Gallchoir who lectures in English at University College, Dublin and is the co- editor, with Susan Manly, of Helen, published this month by Pickering and Chatto as part of the Collected Works of Maria Edgeworth
Edgeworth Events
Highlights of this weekend's festival, which marks the 150th anniversary of the writer's death
Today:
Workshops: 12.30 p.m. and 2 4 p.m. Short Story with playwright and fiction writer Michael Harding; Poetry with poet Noel Monahan; Master Class in Radio Drama with actor and director Laurence Foster. The Old School House, Ballymahon Road, Edgeworthstown. 10.30 a.m. - 12.30 p.m. and 2 - 4 p.m.
Readings: Readings by writers attending the festival. St John's Church. 8.30 p.m.
Tomorrow:
Lecture: 1 p.m. Venue, The Manor. This year's Edgeworth Lecture will be given by Vivian Abbott, author of An Irishman's Revolution and The Abbe Edgeworth and the French Revolution. The Manor. 10.30 a.m. - 1 p.m.
The weekend also features a children's workshop of storytelling, readings and painting with Don Conroy; an exhibition of portraits of the Edgeworth family; and the Maria Edgeworth Literary Competition, from which the winning entries will be published in The Edgeworth Papers.