SOURCE: "Commerce and Character in Maria Edgeworth," in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 49, No. 1, June, 1994, pp. 1-20.

In the following essay, Michals examines "Edgeworth's idea of the relation between personality and property. "

In her time and in our own, Maria Edgeworth's reputation is oddly double. Read as a publicist for middle-class individualism, she is claimed for a progressive program; identified as a gifted apologist for paternalism, she is claimed for a conservative one. On one side of the question, critics like her biographer Marilyn Butler describe her as "the most thorough-going individualist writing outside the jacobin movement," while to others she is a committed paternalist to whom the very idea of "individual and inalienable rights" is deeply suspect. Contemporary reviewers present the same divided view, describing Edgeworth both as a dangerously secular utilitarian and as a reassuringly didactic moralist. In the discussion that follows I will argue that at the...