by Maria Edgeworth

Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) came to live in Ireland at the age of 15. The year was 1782, the same one in which Ireland achieved a short-lived parliamentary independence from English rule, and a year earlier than the setting of her first (widely considered her best) novel, Castle Rackrent. The Anglo-Irish Edgeworth family had held Irish lands since the reign of James I, somehow managing to maintain them despite a history of inept Edgeworths who, in the manner of the Rackrents, did their best to gamble, drink, and mismanage the estate away. In contrast, Maria’s father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was a conscientious landlord and a political progressive, reforming age-old feudal practices...