SOURCE: "Maria Edgeworth and the English Novel," in Family Chronicles: Maria Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent, " edited by Cóilín Owens, Wolfhound Press, 1987, pp. 29-35.

In the following essay, Baker considers Edgeworth as an important transitional novelist whose works link eighteenth-century literary conventions with those of the next century.

Thanks to a happy chronological accident, a bridge was provided from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth in the work of two novelists, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, who belonged to both the old and the new age. Without any shock of surprise or startling change of scenery, we gradually find that the past has been left behind and we are entering upon the present. There are still many features in the scenes brought before the eye which are now obsolete or quaint and old-fashioned. But compare any of their novels with Pamela and Joseph Andrews, the second centenary of...