Maria Edgeworth

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Standard Name: Edgeworth, Maria
Birth Name: Maria Edgeworth
Pseudonym: M. E.
Pseudonym: M. R. I. A.
ME wrote, during the late eighteenth century and especially the early nineteenth century, long and short fiction for adults and children, as well as works about the theory and practice of pedagogy. Her reputation as an Irish writer, and as the inventor of the regional novel, has never waned; it was long before she became outmoded as a children's writer; her interest as a feminist writer is finally being explored.
Watercolour portrait of youthful-looking Maria Edgeworth by John Downman, 1807. She sits on a straight-backed chair, wearing a lacy cap with a blue bow, and a blue, empire-style dress over white, high-necked, gauzy linen.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Dedications Catharine Maria Sedgwick
CMS 's first novel, A New-England Tale; or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners, was licensed: it appeared anonymously that year, with a title-page stanza from Robert Burns , dedicated to Maria Edgeworth .
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. A New-England Tale. Bliss and White, 1822.
prelims
Damon-Bach, Lucinda L., and Victoria Clements, editors. “Editorial Materials”. Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, Northeastern University Press, 2003, p. various pages.
xxxv
Education Mary Russell Mitford
MRM was said to have learned to read by the time she was three. In January 1806 she got through fifty-five volumes, including books by Sarah Harriet Burney , Maria Edgeworth , Elizabeth Hamilton ,...
Education Elizabeth Barrett Browning
EBB 's early immersion in fairy stories and popular tales was followed by a more ambitious course of reading that began around the age of seven with history, classical poetry, and some of Shakespeare 's...
Education Marie Belloc Lowndes
MBL 's formal schooling was minimal. Mrs Shiel, who ran a class she attended which catered mostly to children of Canons of Westminster, claimed to be a follower of Pestalozzi , yet mocked Marie for...
Education Harriet Beecher Stowe
At the age of six Harriet Beecher began attending a primary school. Then, at the age of eight, she entered the Litchfield Female Academy , a boarding school founded by Sarah Pierce in 1792. One...
Education Edna Lyall
Since the cousin with whom she shared lessons was three years older, Ada Ellen read a good many books at that time which must have been far beyond . . . [her] powers. At twelve...
Education Elizabeth Grant
EG refers to a number of texts that influenced her as a child. She learned to read by the age of three, taught by loving aunts, and remembered in particular Puss in Boots, Bluebeard...
Education Catherine Carswell
After her discovery of literature, CC 's early reading included many pious books: Bunyan 's Pilgrim's Progress, Foxe 's Book of Martyrs, and Lives of the Saints. She also read widely in...
Education Angela Thirkell
Initially, Angela was educated at home, where her mother began teaching her to read on her third birthday. She also had a succession of French and German governesses, who taught her French and German as...
Education Georgiana Fullerton
She could read by four-and-a-half, and recalls an early admiration for hymns by Anna Letitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth . Julius Cæsar, the first Shakespearean play that she saw, left a lasting impression. Later...
Education Mary Cowden Clarke
MCC later remembered her responsibility, when very young, of escorting her two next younger brothers to their school.
Clarke, Mary Cowden. My Long Life. Dodd, Mead, 1896.
10
Unlike them, she began her education at home. She writes fondly about the rich array of...
Education Elizabeth Gaskell
Until the age of eleven, Elizabeth was taught at home by her Aunt Hannah Lumb . As befitting the Unitarian emphasis on personal freedom and rationality, she read widely, and was encouraged to make her...
Education Charlotte Yonge
The young CY seems to have been totally unlike her adult self: a noisy, excitable child with a great capacity for screaming.
Battiscombe, Georgina, and E. M. Delafield. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life. Constable and Company, 1943.
43
Her parents followed the system of Richard and Maria Edgeworth for bringing...
Education Frances Power Cobbe
FPC received lessons from her nurse Martha Jones and from her mother . Her reading included Sarah Trimmer 's History of the Robins, Anna Barbauld 's Lessons for Children, and poetry by Jane Taylor
Education Beatrix Potter
Beatrix, educated at home and six years older than her brother, was a solitary child. She had few toys; but she became deeply interested in science, and was also, from an early age, devoted to...

Timeline

About 1766
Printer and engraver John Spilsbury perfected the dissected map which became the forerunner of the jigsaw puzzle.
1783-89
Thomas Day anonymously published The History of Sandford and Merton, a didactic book for children in three volumes (the second published in 1786).
By early March 1792
According to Maria Edgeworth , 25,000 families in England had joined in the boycott against West Indian, that is slave-grown, sugar.
2 July 1798
The conservative Lady's Monthly Museum: or polite repository of amusement and instruction published its first number. Sometimes called The Ladies' Monthly Museum . . . it ran until the 1830s.
10 May to 14 August 1813
The British Institution held a retrospective exhibition of 141 paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds at its Pall Mall Picture Galleries: a major event of the social season, both cultural and patriotic.
Barchas, Janine. What Jane Saw.
15 July 1819
Byron began to publish in instalments (opening with cantos one and two) his satiricalmock-epicpoemDon Juan; he left it unfinished at his death.
9 December 1826
The Literary Gazette printed a Key to Marianne Spencer Hudson 's silver-fork novel, Almack's (titled after the well-known elite gentlemen's club of the same name), which had already reached its second edition this year. The...
1 January 1830
J. W. Croker for the first time used the word Conservative to refer to the party which for a century and half had been called Tory.
1835
Ann Fraser-Tytler 's children's novelMary and Florence; or, Grave and Gay was anonymously published at London.
9 August 1838
The Hampstead circulating library, intended for the middling and lower ranks, which had stocked no novels on principle except those of Scott and Edgeworth , found these were borrowed so much more often than...
17 February 1847
The Whittington Club (named after the poor boy who became Lord Mayor of London) held its first meeting. Unlike traditional gentlemen's clubs, it welcomed women and lower-middle-class men.
Spring 1852
Samuel Orchart Beeton (later the husband of Isabella Mary Beeton) began publishing the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, which stimulated the spread of home dressmaking.
By Christmas 1869
Francis Galton , mathematician, scientist, and eugenicist, published Hereditary Genius: An Enquiry into its Laws and Consequences,
April 1879
James Murray —editor since 1 March of what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary—issued an Appeal for readers to supply illustrative quotations.