Maria Edgeworth's Letters From Ireland

by Maria Edgeworth

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 Valerie Pakenham’s sparkling new selection of over four hundred letters, many hitherto unpublished, will help to celebrate her memory.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 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 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.

Genres: Ireland, Nonfiction

420 pages, Paperback

Published November 11, 2017

About the author

Maria Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish gentry-woman, a daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, born in Oxfordshire and later resettling in County Longford. She eventually took over the management of her father's estate in Ireland and dedicated herself to writing novels that encouraged the kind treatment of Irish tenants and the poor by their landlords.

Reviews

[Nicola Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, I am going to miss this book. I don't normally read letters as I feel that you only get a part of any story at any one time. However, I couldn't resist this gorgeous book when I saw it in my local bookshop before Christmas. I fully expected not to read it for years and, also, when I did get around to reading it, that I would spend the time wishing it was a diary or a memoir - wrong on both counts. Once I opened it last week I couldn't stop reading it and these letters are so wonderful, so crammed with information and tell entire stories in one go, that I had to remind myself that I wasn't actually reading Edgeworth's diary. I also had to remind myself that the letters were almost 200 years old, her voice is so vibrant and engaging. Apart from anything else, they are a compelling insight into Ireland's history, taking in Daniel O'Connell, the Act of Union and then, the Famine. Her life was busy - with writing and 21 half/siblings (her father was a man of many passions!!) - and I loved that she wrote plenty about the books she was reading. Highly recommend it!