SOURCE: "Castle Rackrent," in Maria Edgeworth's Art of Prose Fiction, Mouton, 1971, pp. 43-71.

In the following essay, Harden focuses on Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), extolling the novel as the first in which Irish provincial life and character are carefully observed and depicted. harden examines the biographical and political events which shaped Edgeworth's views and writings and argues that of Edgeworth's novels, Castle Rackrent best demonstrates her literary talent.

The year 1800 was a history-making year for Maria Edgeworth and for Ireland which she now claimed as her own, for it was in this year that the "minnicin lion" produced the work which critics of the novel consider as the most influential narrative prose between the death of Smollett (1771) and the publication of Waverly (1814). It presented the first careful study of provincial life and manners; pointed the way to a more penetrating and respectful treatment of peasant life; introduced the...