The case of Maria Edgeworth

Two hundred years ago, Irish writer Maria Edgeworth was a star. She was paid thousands for her novels, while Jane Austen was still paying to have hers published. Now everyone has read Pride and Prejudice (or at least seen the movie), so why has nobody ever heard of Edgeworth?

Claire Connolly, O’Brien Visiting Scholar at Concordia’s School of Canadian Irish Studies, explains that it wasn’t easy for any one community to lay claim to Maria Edgeworth.

“She’s very much a figure who is in between Ireland and Britain. In Ireland, she belonged to the elite Anglo-Irish group, the small Protestant minority who had all the power, but she wrote about the dispossessed Catholics. So her reputation is tainted or compromised by her religion and her class affiliations.”

Another reason Edgeworth’s fame didn’t survive the centuries was that, even though her writing was relatively easy to read, understanding the complex ironies at play was more difficult. “Her style is not hard to read, but she’s quite an intellectual writer and she has a lot of concerns about the philosophy and the politics of her day,” Connolly says. “It’s partly about knowing the codes to unlock her and to read her more fully, because she’s very clued into specific things from her own day.”

What does it mean to decipher these codes and recover Edgeworth for a 21st century readership? This question will be explored in a joint discussion between Connolly and James Chandler, the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor from the University of Chicago, who will try to offer fresh perspectives on the idea of literary recovery.

Connolly says that a lot of literary recovery that has been going on over the last few decades was inspired by the revolution in feminist literary criticism. “Part of the idea of the talk is that we should think a bit more about why we do that, and what we’re looking for when we recover lost writers,” she says. “Why do they get lost in the first place? What are the dynamics of loss and forgetting?”

James Chandler and Claire Connolly

As feminist history and literary criticism took off, Maria Edgeworth began to enjoy a taste of her former popularity. She was, after all, a writer who was interested in gender and wrote a lot about it. Nevertheless, her views were relatively conservative. “She was of the school of feminism where she thought you should just educate people to be better, but not that you should just overthrow the system and start again,” Connolly says.

So, Edgeworth wasn’t carrying the feminist flag. She was no Mary Wollstonecraft. But she was a literary pioneer. She was experimenting with narrative form before it was acceptable to do so. She was breaking the rules before they had been written. Her first published novel, Castle Rackrent, was written entirely in the voice of an Irish peasant. “It’s terribly unstable,” says Connolly. “With the advent of Joyce and modernism, and the idea of unreliable narrators, we were able to read that kind of story better, but it was almost out of its time. It’s such a remarkable piece of writing!”

After Rackrent, Edgeworth settled down to write much more traditional third-person narratives, and her popularity grew. Then, when the novel became more of an acceptable form among male writers, her star began to fade.

Rescuing Maria Edgeworth from the dustbin of literary history involves looking at her from many different angles. “Race, class, gender, nationality: she’s interested in all of those things, but she’s not comfortable in any one of those boxes,” Connolly says.

Edgeworth lived off in the Irish countryside with her father, a philosopher and inventor, on his modest estate, but she was not shielded from society. As Connolly puts it, Edgeworth “was all about the life of the mind and ideas. But probably when she actually pitched up in London and went to polite dinner parties she may have sometimes said the wrong thing.”

When: Friday, September 23 at 5 p.m.
Where: Room LB-646, J.W. McConnell Library Building (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W., 6th floor)

The event is sponsored by Concordia’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture and is free to the public.

Listen to Claire Connolly, O’Brien Visiting Scholar, School of Canadian Irish Studies, reading from Castle Rackrent, by Irish author Maria Edgeworth: