She was an Irish authoress, the daughter of the well-educated clergyman, writer, and inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth. She lived from 1767 to 1849, and wrote her most important works after the French Revolution and during the Napoleonic era. During her lifetime she was widely celebrated; even King George III read Castle Rackrent, prominent people from Jeremy Bentham through Lord Byron to Talleyrand admired her books, and Sir Walter Scott corresponded with her for many years. I assume that she was much in fashion during Victorian times, too, and the American writer Louisa May Alcott was undoubtedly much influenced by her.
So much for her biography. Her writing is thoroughly didactic; though she does not lack imagination and a natural enjoyment of storytelling, her tales are really constructed for the purpose of "pointing a moral," which is most likely the result of her father's and her own lifelong interest in educational questions. She makes sure that no good action goes without a reward and that no bad action goes without punishment, she uses italics to emphasize her point, and she has no shyness about directly enunciating a moral. Some of her works are too long, and she stacks up illustrations of wrongdoing and its consequences ad absurdum. But in her works for adults the moralizing is sometimes more subtle, and her points of view are usually surprisingly enlightened and modern. She extremely rarely, for example, mentions religion. This modernity can probably be attributed to her father's broad acquaintance and interests, both scientific and artistic, also at a time when religious skepticism was rife in intellectual circles. In England her father knew Erasmus Darwin, and joined the Lunar Club, whose members also included James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood; she was also related to the Abbé Edgeworth, who was the confessor of King Louis XVI and a highly regarded man in French society.
It is due to this background also that her works are interspersed with literary references; she quotes Alexander Pope,Thomas Gray, John Gay, Voltaire, etc., and mentions scores of others. She also adorns her prose with a broad variety of interesting anecdotes, and she sprinkles French and Italian expressions throughout her writing. These displays of knowledge are not affected, I think, but reflect the conversational powers that were treasured in the society of her time, and give much insight into contemporary thought and literature. It is nice to read her books, to have one's mind entertained as well as the soul, and to come away not only with curiosity about the quotations, but also a wish to learn more in general (though I never do). And her books and stories are a treasure-trove of detail about daily life.
Miss Edgeworth wrote nine major novels: Belinda, The Absentee (which was originally a play), Castle Rackrent, Ennui, Ormond, Harrington, Patronage, Leonora and Helen. She also wrote many plays, comedy-dramas, mostly set in Ireland. And, aside from essays, she wrote many stories for young and old. The stories include "Murad the Unlucky," set in Haroun al-Rashid's Baghdad and very much in the style of the Arabian Nights; "Rosanna," about a simple and virtuous rural Irish family; "The Good Aunt," about a boy and his education at home and at boarding-school; "Madame de Fleury," a tale based on the real life of a lady in revolutionary France; and bleak tales about the evils of procrastination ("To-morrow") and so on, that are clearly meant for an older audience.
I read Castle Rackrent too long ago to be able to describe it, but it is probably the least idealized and most modern of her works. It has no "mushy bits." Ennui is a compromise between Castle Rackrent and The Absentee, about a young Irish nobleman who fritters away his youth in England and suffers endlessly from boredom (hence the title), until he returns to Ireland and then encounters a misfortune that rouses him to earn his own living and make something of himself. The Absentee was once much admired; it traces the fortunes of Lord Colambre, the son of an Irish absentee landlord, Lord Clonbrony. Lord Colambre has been raised in England and educated at Cambridge, and so has no real connection to Ireland at first, until he starts to rediscover his homeland for himself; the father would have no objection to returning to Ireland; the mother disclaims any Irish tendencies in favour of being as English as she possible can, and she strains to become a personage in London society. The central themes of the book are England vs. Ireland, and the problems associated with absentee landlords (stewards who exploit the peasants, etc.). Ormond is another celebration of Irish virtues mixed with a caution against Irish failings (short temper, bibulousness, etc.), and it has an intriguing change of scene to Paris.
Belinda is a conventional and long-winded tale about an innocent young lady entering a society that is largely devoid of innocence, somewhat in the vein of Fanny Burney, and Maria Edgeworth herself tired considerably of it before she finished writing it. Harrington is also conventional and one of my least favourite of her books; it was written in response to a reader's justified complaint about the unflattering caricatures of moneylending Jews in her other works. But, as far as I remember, the plot is weak and the characterization unconvincing, particularly because she probably did not know any Jew, let alone one who was fortunate enough to be wealthy (without being a money-lender) and well-educated. Helen, her final novel (published in 1834), is about a young lady who comes to stay with her friend after her guardian dies, meets an intelligent and generous young man, and then is prevented from marrying him after she is falsely suspected of having been entangled with another man -- until the inevitable happy ending. The heroine is loveable, I think, and if I knew high society I would undoubtedly be delighted with the way the authoress depicts it in the book, but I don't find the long and painfully gradual dénouement very realistic or enlivening.
Patronage, which was published in 1814, is most likely my favourite book of Maria Edgeworth's, because it has so much to offer. The heroine is Caroline Percy, an unrealistic but pleasant compound of prudence and high-mindedness and generosity, but the book closely follows the fortunes of many other characters, particularly her brothers: Godfrey Percy, a soldier; Alfred Percy, a lawyer; and Erasmus Percy, a doctor. The memorable personalities also include Lord Oldborough, an experienced politician with strong will and strong principles, but a considerable lack of the softer virtues, and a near inability to trust anyone. In this book the countless subplots are, I think, justified, because they are interesting and worthwhile elements in a broad and detailed picture.
Leonora is an epistolary novel that exemplifies the Edgeworthian morality that I find questionable. The heroine is a newly married woman who invites her friend Olivia to stay with her, in an attempt to shield Olivia from rumours about her personal life that would otherwise ruin her social life. Leonora's husband, in the meantime, takes it into his head to flirt with Olivia, first of all to amuse himself by drawing out her foibles, then to test his wife's love for him by trying to provoke jealousy, and finally because he is infatuated by Olivia. The test worked well enough, but Leonora considers that it is due to her sense of trust in her husband that she repress her jealousy and ignore the flirting, so her husband doesn't see it. Her friend and husband are convinced that she is emotionally cold (whereas she is only intensely suffering in saintly silence), and eventually run off even though the wife is expecting a child. But the married couple is reunited after Leonora's mother sends her daughter's letters to the delinquent spouse to reveal the true feelings of the wife, and a deus ex machina reveals the true perfidy of Olivia. So the themes are wifely duty, society and reputation, and the cult of sensibility that was in vogue in France at the time versus good old-fashioned English virtue.
Anyway, to speak of the morality, I've never comprehended the nineteenth-century idea, which Maria Edgeworth evidently shares, that a wife is supposed to suffer her husband to run around with other people, and that the best cure is to make the home so pleasant that he won't want to leave it. First of all, the pleasant home idea probably doesn't work; secondly, the idea implicitly places the burden of blame on the woman, whereas the husband may really be a good-for-nothing; and, thirdly, it presents a double standard since women were decidedly not permitted to philander, and so their life was even more unfairly embittered than that of a betrayed husband would be. But I guess that these objections are now self-evident, or divorce would never have become such a common institution.
"Madame de Fleury" poses another serious problem. The titular heroine, though a society lady, opens a school for poor working-men's children in Paris. One of her pupils, Victoire, displays a talent for poetry, but Madame de Fleury resolves not to notice, develop, or encourage it. There are many reasons given for this resolve, all of them highly paternalistic. Here is one reason not to encourage talented young people, which is explained in a truly Edgeworthian sentence:
Early called into public notice, probably before their moral habits are formed, they are extolled for some play of fancy or of wit, as Bacon calls it, some juggler's trick of the intellect; they immediately take an aversion to plodding labour, they feel raised above their situation; possessed by the notion that genius exempts them, not only from labour, but from vulgar rules of prudence, they soon disgrace themselves by their conduct, are deserted by their patrons, and sink into despair, or plunge into profligacy. [1]
[Footnote 1: To these observations there are honourable exceptions.]
Source: Tales and Novels, Vol. 6, "Madame de Fleury"
Maria Edgeworth goes on to tell that other pupils of Madame de Fleury have talents in music and dancing, but that their talents go equally undeveloped, for the same reasons and because theirs are "talents which in their station were more likely to be dangerous than serviceable." I understand that the opera and theatres at that time did not offer safe careers, but I think that the pupils' talents could have been developed for their own amusement. Madame de Fleury's idea essentially means consciously stunting a child's mind and soul, and I don't find that permissible.
Last of all, the style, though not brilliant, tends to flow quite clearly. It is still much tinged with eighteenth-century language -- clear grammatical structures and abstract terms. Where the Irish brogue appears, it seems natural and is certainly legible, which cannot always be said of that of other authors; the colloquialisms of the time are also well used depending on the character of the speaker. And every now and then the narration contains a good observation. For example: "A woman may always judge of the real estimation in which she is held, by the conversation which is addressed to her."
Anyway, I'll stop here; for, to quote a couplet by Alexander Pope which Maria Edgeworth also quoted in Patronage:
Words are like leaves; and where they most aboundAnd it is 6 a.m. local time.
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
Sources:
http://www.online-literature.com/maria-edgeworth/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Edgeworth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Darwin
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1 comment:
Correction: "Murad the Unlucky" (paragraph 5) is set not in Haroun al-Rashid's Baghdad, but in Constantinople.
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