1 January 2018 will be the 250th anniversary of Maria Edgeworth's
birth. Valerie Pakenham's sparkling new selection of over four
hundred letters, many hitherto unpublished, will help to celebrate
her memory. Born in England, she was brought to live in Ireland at
the age of fourteen and spent most of the rest of her life at the
family home at Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford. Encouraged by her
remarkable father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose memoirs she
edited, she became, in turn, famous for her children's stories, her
practical guides to education and her novels - or, as she preferred
to call them, `Moral Tales'. By 1813, when visiting London, she
was, as Byron testified, as great a literary lion as he had been
the season before, and she was hugely admired by fellow novelists
Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. Maria Edgeworth's posthumous fame
has dwindled and only her first novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), a
brilliant burlesque account of the Irish squirearchy, is still
widely read. She was, however, a prolific and fascinating letter
writer. She insisted that her letters were for private consumption
only, but after her death, her stepmother and half-sisters produced
a private memoir for friends using carefully selected extracts.
Their literary quality was spotted by Augustus Hare, whose
shortened version, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth,
appeared in 1894. In the 1970s Maria's great great niece, Christina
Colvin edited Maria Edgeworth's Letters from England and Maria
Edgeworth in France & Switzerland. No one, however, has
revisited fully Maria's original letters from the place she loved
and knew best: Ireland. From 1825, Maria's letters reflect sixty
years of Irish history, from the heady days of Grattan's
Parliament, through the perils of the 1798 Rebellion to the rise of
O'Connell and the struggle for Catholic Emancipation. In old age,
she worked actively to alleviate the Great Famine and wrote her
last story to raise money aged 82. A treasure trove of stories,
humour, local and high-level gossip, her letters show the
extraordinary range of her interests: history, politics, literature
and science. Maria almost single-handedly took over the management
of her family estate and restored it to solvency. Her later letters
brim with delight at these practical undertakings and her affection
for the local people she worked with. Two of her half-sisters and
her stepmother were gifted artists, and Valerie Pakenham has been
able to use many of their unpublished drawings and sketches to
illustrate this book.
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