SOURCE: "Maria Edgeworth," in The Spectator, Vol. 182, No. 6308, May 20, 1949, pp. 672-73.

In the following overview of Edgeworth's career, West discusses Richard Edgeworth's influence on his daughter's literary work.

On May 22nd, 1849, Maria Edgeworth died at the age of eighty-two in the arms of her third stepmother, who was a year younger and lived to write her life. Not that Miss Edgeworth's life was especially eventful. It is true that she travelled and met many of her distinguished contemporaries. But the greater part of her life was spent immersed in a family, and filled with work in the house and at her desk. Though she had no children of her own, her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, married four times and had twenty children. Maria, as the eldest, had to act as mother during the brief marital interregnums, and provide continuity and cohesion for the several families. Above all, she...