Maria Edgeworth

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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.

Milestones

1 January 1768

ME was born at Black Bourton in Oxfordshire, home of her mother's family.
ME 's biographer Marilyn Butler , in a footnote, discusses the different dates ascribed to her birth—1 January 1767 or 1768. She suggests that more evidence supports the later date (ODNB concurs), and cites an article in which she and Christina Colvin consider the evidence.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
36n1
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
36

1779

ME 's father began an Arabian fable and asked the eleven-year-old Maria to finish it for him.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
57, 146

By October 1787

ME wrote another early short story, The Bracelets.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
155
Butler, Marilyn. “Edgeworth’s Stern Father: Escaping Thomas Day, 1795-1801”. Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, edited by Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker, Clarendon, pp. 75-93.
76

January 1800

ME , as M. E., published her first novel, Castle Rackrent, pioneer in the genre of the national tale.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
354, 505

1848

ME published at Edinburgh her last work, Orlandino, a children's story written for the benefit of the Irish Poor Relief Fund during the famine years.
Myers, Mitzi, and Maria Edgeworth. “Introduction”. The Little Dog Trusty; The Orange Man; and, The Cherry Orchard, Augustan Reprints, Augustan Reprint Society, p. iii - xiii.
iii

22 May 1849

ME died at Edgeworthstown House, aged eighty-one, a few hours after complaining of a pain around her heart.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
429

Biography

Birth

1 January 1768

ME was born at Black Bourton in Oxfordshire, home of her mother's family.
ME 's biographer Marilyn Butler , in a footnote, discusses the different dates ascribed to her birth—1 January 1767 or 1768. She suggests that more evidence supports the later date (ODNB concurs), and cites an article in which she and Christina Colvin consider the evidence.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
36n1
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
36