Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Maria Edgeworth
-
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.
Here she relates significant moments in her life to what she was reading at the time. She says that her reading, directed at first by chance and the choices of others, later moved towards what...
Author summary
Molly Keane
MK
had two distinct phases in her writing career. Between 1926 and 1961 she wrote, under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell, eleven novels and four plays. After almost twenty years of silence, she published...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
MAK
quotes Geraldine Jewsbury
and Maria Edgeworth
, and remarks that although unmarried herself she has observed what goes wrong in marriage: she traces difficulties between couples to the demand for too much feeling. The...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Margaret Kennedy
Here Kennedy argues that entertainment and enjoyment are valuable aims for the novel. She maintains that the novelist is, in essence, a storyteller, but the storyteller-novelist has been excluded by a literary society that devalues...
Textual Features
L. E. L.
The novel also has a strong political element. It comments on the power of newspapers in national life, through reporting and editorials but also through advertising. Mr Delawarr is, says literary historian Edward Copeland, a...
Literary responses
Lady Caroline Lamb
Reviewers were anything but indifferent. The New Monthly Magazine thought the title character ably and vigorously drawn and the book therefore a moral one: a fearful beacon to warn the young and inexperienced. But the...
Textual Production
Emily Lawless
EL
published her life of Maria Edgeworth (she dated her brief preface this month).
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
Lawless, Emily. Maria Edgeworth. Macmillan.
prelims
Literary responses
Emily Lawless
The Literary World vividly likened experiencing this novel to reading the life of a past century by lightning flashes, and the half-blinded reader reads on and on and cannot stop or look away short of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Lawless
Collections of EL
's shorter works of fiction also appeared, including Plain Frances Mowbray, and Other Tales, 1889 (whose title story is set in Venice),
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
Lawless is keen to treat Edgeworth as an Irish author, noting her appropriation so far by the English. All of her biographers have, so far as my researches have gone, been English; consequently, the more...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margery Lawrence
She took this title from a remark by Maria Edgeworth
: Today is the Tomorrow of Yesterday.
Lawrence, Margery. The Tomorrow of Yesterday. Robert Hale.
prelims
Her Author's Foreword maintains that this is not a work of science fiction. The story, she says...
Friends, Associates
Mary Leadbeater
While in England ML
visited Edmund Burke
at Beaconsfield. He had attended school and university with her father and had been taught by her grandfather; he made his final visit to Ballitore in 1786...
Textual Production
Mary Leadbeater
It had a preface and notes by Maria Edgeworth
, who did not know ML
very well personally but was impressed by the book. The Chawton House Library
copy is one presented by Edgeworth to...
Textual Features
Q. D. Leavis
The essay Jane Austen: Novelist of a Changing Society effectively illustrates QDL
's major critical interests, values, and methodology. It argues that in her life and writing, Jane Austen is a moralist, but one whose...
