Maria Edgeworth: Commentary (3)

Ann Owen Weekes, Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition (Kentucky UP 1990), on Castle Rackrent: ‘Within the text itself Edgeworth draws clear parallels between the behaviour of the Rackrents as landlords and of the Rackrents as husbands, the comparison she points to in the preface […] In Rackrent each wife escapes upon her husband’s death, her fortune intact and indeed in two cases increased.’ [42]; ‘Ironically, as a colonised Gaelic-Irish servant, one of Elizabeth Janeway’s weak, Thady can be seen as a surrogate woman, one prevented from supporting her natural allies by the need to remain in the good grace of the powerful.’ (P.43.) ‘The Rackrents of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent are equally appalling as husbands and as landlords.’ (p.212.)

Martin J. Croghan, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Tradition of Irish Semiotics’, in Donald E. Morse, et al., eds., A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993), pp.194-206: ‘The Essay on Irish Bulls on the whole is a powerful tour de force against symbolic violence, but it is forced to admit at the end that it is not able to cope with the national characteristics model, the model which is usually used to generate inter-group symbolic violence, whether the distinction between groups is based on ethnicity, religion, nationality, or sex. But the Edgeworth acceptance of the model - and their adoption of the model could hardly be regarded as enthusiastic - is hardly surprising when it is still commonly accepted, at least implicitly, in many areas of academia, and when it is realised that this same framework is entrenched in popular cultures in Westernised societies and in many Western languages. / Perhaps the most surprising deficiency in the Essay is that the Edgeworths ultimately failed to come to terms with brogue-write. They seemed to want to persist in a mode of thinking which assumes that there can somehow be an absolute correlation between a graphic and a phonic medium, despite the fact that in the ‘Little Dominic’ episode, the Edgeworths worked with the principle that brogue-write is an index of deviancy. The Edgeworth failure to come to terms with the objective purpose of the brogue is also surprising for another reason. Swift, who was the inspiration for the Edgeworth Essay on Irish Bulls, had explicitly stated that it is the brogue which makes the deliverer ‘ridiculous and despised’ and that the brogue and the bull can only be understood as expressions of stage-Irishism; it was this quotation of Swift which the Edgeworths adapted in the Essay.’ (p.200.) [Cont.]

Martin J. Croghan, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Tradition of Irish Semiotics’, 1993) - cont.: ‘In conclusion: The Essay on Irish Bulls was the first major study in book length of stereotyping, and the first single study of stageIrishism. The Essay is still an important work because of the innovatory concepts used in the analysis of stereotyping, its uses of examples to illustrate theory, and its readiness to experiment with genre in order to communicate with the reader and to win the argument. The quality of the empirical research meets the requirements of present day academic studies though the use of more than one genre of writing and the explicit display of anger would make the work unacceptable to academic publishing today.’ (p.204.) [Cont.]

Martin J. Croghan (‘Maria Edgeworth and the Tradition of Irish Semiotics’, 1993) - cont.: ‘The first noteworthy concept in the Essay is the complete rejection of any type of innatism which often accompanies symbolic violence; this dismissal came at the beginning of the century which was to adopt such thinking wholeheartedly, a type of thinking which, in turn, would contribute to multiple genocide in Europe in the twentieth century. The second important concept in the Essay is the stress on the relationship between symbolic violence and identity; a group defines itself as superior by defining the other as inferior. The third critical concept is the role of humour in symbolic violence, and the Edgeworth readiness to use humour to win the argument, even when the humour is the stage-Irish humour of the bull. The second and third concept are also seen as acting together in the relationship of laughter and superiority (Essay on Irish Bulls, p. 89). It might be said in criticism, that the Edgeworths fail to provide any classification of bulls and therefore any detailed taxonomy of how the Irish are portrayed by such humour; in could be said in defense that since the Essay was published, there has been no study of bulls which provides any such classification or taxonomy. / The most difficult problem for the conclusion is to explain how someone who could write such a passionate critique of symbolic violence could also write stage-Irishism; the reference is to the intellectual dilemma not to any moral issue. The answer to the quandry of the ‘unjustly neglected Maria Edgeworth’ may be found in Castle Rackrent, the novel published two years before the Essay on Irish Bulls. In Castle Rackrent and The Rose, Thistle and Shamrock, Edgeworth uses the phrase ‘plain English’ for, what she considers, the authentic code, and any alternative can be considered a symbol of non-authenticity.’ So Thady, the principal character of Castle Rackrent, is said by the author to speak in his ‘vernacular idiom,’ and Edgeworth would similarly depict Irish characters in her other writings by this tactic of linguistic marking.’ [Cont.]

Martin J. Croghan (‘Maria Edgeworth and the Tradition of Irish Semiotics’, 1993) - cont.: ‘Maria Edgeworth did not have a Somerville and Ross competence in Hiberno-English, but she was a linguist and stylist of great ability, and it would be far-fetched to claim she did not realise in some way that she was marking for deviancy when she wrote, for example, the pseudo-naturalistic language which is used by Irish characters who were not rogues or comic figures such as the Widow Larkin in The Rose, Thistle and Shamrock, and Thady in her novel Castle Rackrent. It was this novel which played an important part in the development of what is sometimes called the regional novel; from a linguistic point of view, it was this novel which inspired a whle tradition of novel writing which uses so-called dialect writing. It is also reasonable to argue on the evidence of the Preface and Epilogue of Castle Rackrent that she knew what she [was] doing when she used langauge to mark certain characters or ethnic or national groups, as other than normal. Unfortunately, many of the writers who copied Maria Edgeworth’s regional writing were linguistic innocents who thought that their so-called dialect writing was an authetic expression of regional speech; many literary critics hav been equally innocent, unfortunately, including many who write about Irish literature. [End] In a endnote, Croghan calls the Essay ‘possibly the most original intellectual work of international relevance which has appeared in Ireland over the last two centuries’ - with reference to the analysis of ‘symbolic violence’ in it’ and further refers to his own Demythologising Hiberno-English (Boston: Working Papers, Northeastern Univ. 1990); a further disparaging comment is directed towards R[ichard] Wall, ‘Dialect in Anglo-Irish Literature - the Hermetic Core’, in Irish University Review, 20, 1 (1990), cp.18.

Mary Jean Corbett, ‘Another tale to tell: postcolonial theory and the case of Castle Rackrent’, in Criticism, 36 (Summer 1994) - summary: The writer examines Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent in the context of postcolonial theory. She asserts that it is the comic distance between English and Irish, relatively unmediated by their geographical closeness, that is exploited in this text. Investigating the construction of that distance in the novel, and in Edgeworth’s biography, she focuses on linguistic, cultural, and gender differences and their relation to extant structures of colonial power and authority. She concludes that Castle Rackrent may be read as an articulation of the shifting relations of power between coloniser and colonised women and men in which no one group - not even the ostensibly dominant one - can be said to lack agency, given that all, including Edgeworth herself, are located within “the process of subjectification”. [First Search May 1998.]

Terry Eagleton, ‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 1 (Spring 1994), pp.17-26: ‘For this representation is also an intervention, as covertly tendentious as Thady Quirk’s blandly mischievous commentary in Castle Rackrent. Only an external vantage point, free from all native doxa, could serve the truth; but this epistemological oustside is a site of power, part of what it inspects, so that the distance which supposedly enables true cognition also disables it. The popular language which Edgeworth represents [19] is weapon, seduction, dissemblance, apologia - anything, in short, but representational; and Edgeworth understands well enough that discourse is in this sense a question of power. Language is strategic for the oppressed and representational for their rulers. There are many different truths in Ireland […]’ (&c.; pp.19-20; and cf., W. M. Thackeray on Ireland, infra.) Further: ‘Anglo-Irish literature begins with one of the world’s greatest anti-novels [Castle Rackrent], and achieves its apotheosis in a couple of others. […] If realism is the home of stability, it is equally the locus of totality. (‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’, in Literary Relations: Ireland, Egypt and the Far East, ed. Mary Massoud, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1996, pp.135-46, p.136.)

Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso 1995), ‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’, pp.124-144; esp. 161-77, on Maria Edgeworth [comments on Castle Rackrent]: Such is the doubleness of one of Irish fiction’s most intriguingly enigmatic characters, Thady Quirk in Maria Edgeowrth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), and it is perhaps not surprising that this ambivalent creation should be the work of an upper-class woman, who is likely to experience a somewhat parallel conflict between her social power and sexual subordination. [161]; How tongue in cheek is Thady’s toadying to this lineage of moral desperadoes? [162]; The verve and brio of his discourse partly qualify its cringe: he may be a groveller, but the language which betrays the fact is garrulously self-assertive […] His loquacyity is a kind of artlessness, an unstaunchable excess of speech; but it is also, so we may suspect, the rhetorical strategy of the “lower Irish”, disarming authority by its rumbustious spontaneity and wrapping unpalatable truths in its endless parataxis. [162]; The more Thady exculpates his masters, or can be felt blandly manipuating the narrative in their favour, the worse it is for them: they are now responsible not only for their own squalid conduct but for a monstrous blunting of moral sensibility around them. [163; Cont.]

Terry Eagleton (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 1995) - cont.: ‘Castle Rackrent can be read as embodying an idoelogical conflict we can disceern elsewhere in Edgeworth, between the values of a vital if anarchic ruling class which is able, whatever its moral shabbiness, to secure the allegiance of its underlings, and the rational virtues of a more sober social order whose austere utility will win it few ardent adherents. [163; sees the treatment of King Crony and Ulick O’Shane in this light]; The danger with unreliable first-person narration is the lack of a metalanguage by which its flaws might be measured […] [it is] the Preface, footnotes and glossary which supervise and regulatre Thady’s dishevelled Irish discourse with a very English ironic condescension. [164]; From this standpoint, the novel is not after all a masterpiece of Swiftian undecidability or triumph of dialogic indeterminacy’ [164]; ‘Is Castle Rackrent, however, really as assured a text as all that? [quizzes its relation to the 1798 Rebellion]. […] 164] What if […] Thady were no loyal lackey but a type of the disaffected Catholic peasantry, concealing his subversion beneath a mask of servility and working covertly for the overthrow of the landlords? His story would then be a species of performative contradiction […’; cites Tom Dunne, Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind, 1984.] [Cont.]

Terry Eagleton (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 1995) - cont.: ‘If the meaning of the novel is hard to decipher, then, it may be because of an ambiguity in its assesesment of the past forced upon it by present circumstances [i.e., the Rebellion; 166]; other [Edgeworth] novels largely dismissive of Gaelic traditionalism [166]; The theory that Thady is dissembling his disaffections has some interesting implications. For it is we he is fooling - we, the readers, who exert no kind of power over him, but who are consequently placed in [166] the position of his superiors [or else] it is less the reader he is conning than the “Editor” to whom he recounts his tale, a figure who would fall squarely enough for him into the category of class enemy […] In this sense, curiously, it is Maria Edgeworth who is being taken for a ride by one of her own creations. [167]; Thady is a domestic servant, and so in a sense in the position of a woman; […] his narrative, which has a stereotypically feminine intimacy, eye for detail and obliqueness to the public world., is thus at one level that of a wife who knows her husband too well to thing anything but badly of him, but who is patriarchially constrained from defining herself as disloyal. [167]; Thady’s self-serving blunders and oversights […] would then be […] Freudian parapraxis, symptoms of a smouldering animosity barred from the conscious mind. Such a reading of the work is wholly debatable; but it would make the novel an extraordinarily perceptive portrait of the workings of ideology, in which conscious beliefs and unconscious intentions can often be at odds; and it would chime with Edgeworth’s sense, elsewhere in her writing, that truth and fictin in ireland are not so much at odds as inextricably intermingled. [167] (Cont.)

Terry Eagleton (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 1995) - cont.: ‘Only an outside vantage point, free from nativist doxa and self-serving, can deliver the truth; but this epistemological outside is also a site of power [...] Edgeworth’s language trades in power while striving to be innocent of it, negotiates conficts by which it remains aloofly uncontaminated.’ [176; quoted in quoted in Kendra Reynolds, UG essay, UU 2011.]

See further remarks on 19th c. Irish fiction - viz., ‘We have learnt from Mikhail Bahktin to view the novel as an inherently dialogical form, a conflict of conversation between different codes, languages, genres; but the Irish nineteenth century novel is dialogical in a rather more precise sense of the term. For what we are listening to when we read it is one side of a fraught conversation with the British reading public, the other side of which can only be inferred or reconstructed from the words on the page. Like Irish political rhetoric, which knew that it would be reported and reacted to on the mainland and crafted itself accordingly, Irish fiction constantly overhears itself in the ears of its British interlocutors, editing and adjusting its discourse to those ends, holding the prejudices of its implicit addressee steadily in mind and constituting itself, at least in part, on the basis of that putative response.’ (Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 1995, p.201; quoted in Jacqueline Belanger, ‘Educating the Reading Public: British Critical Reception of Maria Edgeworth’s Early Irish Writing’, in Irish University Review, Autumn/Winter 1998, pp.240-55 [available at JSTOR online], p.241-42).

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Daniel Hack, ‘Inter-nationalism: Castle Rackrent and Anglo-Irish Union’, in Novel, 29 (Winter 1996) pp.145-64: An examination of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent against the background of the union of Ireland and Great Britain in 1800 to form the United Kingdom. The governing logic is one of supplementarity, with the novel using this logic to foster an understanding of Union as a continuing or reiterable process of assimilation. Edgeworth initiates a system of supplementary rationality that endlessly defers complete union while working toward it and that circulates anxiety so as to create and sustain a desire to continue this process. [First Search May 1998]

Colin Graham, ‘History, Gender and the Colonial Moment’, in Irish Studies Review (Spring 1996) pp.21-24: interprets the Anglo-Irish Union of 1800 in terms of Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture, Routledge 1994), applying in particular his concept of “sly civility”, an essay-title in that collection (pp.93-101) and a phrase taken in turn from Bishop Potts on the attitude of native Indians towards the English religion and culture in 1818; the essay rests on quotes such as the following: “When Ireland loses her identity by an Union with Great Britain, she will look back with a smile of complacency on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence.” (Preface, p.63); Graham considers that the ‘text itself delineates a succession of failing marriages and unions.’ (p.23.) ‘The text pushes towards the notion of marriage the appropriate construction for understanding the union / Union, yet ironises its own expressed belief in the ability of union to facilitate a loss of identity tantamount to a discursive monologism.’ (p.24) Bhabha’s notion of the “double articulation’ of colonialism and sly civility provides a rule of interpretation for the author’s prefatory expression of unwillingness to “translate” out of the language of John Langan.

Siobhán Kilfeather, ‘Origins of Female Gothic’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 2 (Autumn 1994), pp.35-45: ‘While Ireland provided a gothic closet or priest-hole for many colonial skeletons of the English imagination, Irish writers themselves frequently displaced horror and fraternal enmity in their own midst on to revolutionary France.’ Kilfeather cites Edgeworth’s ‘Madame de Fleury’ as a correlate of ‘the Edgeworth’s departure from their home and their fears of assault’ with the ‘behaviour of the French peasantry revised into a more flattering gratitude than that shown to the Edgeworths by their own frightened and confused tenantry.’ (p.42); ‘The possibility of native rebellion was to be most strongly denied as it contradicted a developing theory of cultural transmission in which the Protestant Irish were constructing themselves as the true legatees and rpeservers of Irish culture and identity / Early Irish gothic displays a surprising reluctance to permit local horrors. […] When stories by Irish women are set in Ireland villainy is imported from England or continental Europe.’ (p.42.) [Cont.]

Siobhán Kilfeather, ‘Origins of Female Gothic’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 2 (Autumn 1994), pp.35-45 - cont.: ‘After 1798 griefs became less comfortable, horrors more pronounced. Edgeworth, Owenson, and Roche in her later fiction developed more direct ways of addressing the analogies between structures of power within the family, within the state, and between the kingdoms. If the gothic emerged as a response to enlightenment […] then in Ireland the defenses against “barbarism” were always particularly precarious. Every stage in the progress towards greater “civilisation” brought within the pale a recalcitrant population, nursing unspeakable passions.’ (p.44.)

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Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Trial of Jove: Spenser’sAllegory and the Mastery of the Irish’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 2, 2 (Spring/Summer 1996), pp.39-53; Hadfield applies Kilfeather’s model to Spenser, taking inter alia the passage on Irish cloaks as evidence that the English settlers were disturbed by the breakdown of gender hierarchies in Ireland: ‘The fact that mantles are garments worn by both sexes would further suggest that such “monstrous disguising” has a gendered implication. [43] That Irish men and women do not choose to define themselves by dint of their clothing, ipso facto, marks that clothing out as disrupting sexual distinctions. The use to which the mantle was put reinforces the notion that disruptedness is itself a feminine trait, subversive of masculine order […] In Ireland the hierarchies have been overturned.’ (pp.43-44).

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Brian Hollingworth, Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History and Politics (London: Macmillan 1997): Hollingworth notes the low esteem in which Maria held the vernacular method of Castle Rackrent, and further comments on learning that The Absentee has been translated: ‘It is impossible that a Parisian can make any sense of it from beginning to end. But these things teach authors what is merely local and temporary (Memoir, 1867, 1, p.296; Hollingworth, p.9); characterises the Edgeworth’s as believers in a ‘monolithic and hierarchical view of language’ (p.18); ‘The language of children, who have heard no language but what is good, must be correct. On the contrary, children who hear a mixture of low and high vulgarity before their habits are fixed must, whenever they speak, continually blunder; they have no rule to guide their judgement […; &c.]’ (Practical Education, Vol. 1, p.323; here p.19.) [Cont.]

Brian Hollingworth, Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History and Politics (London: Macmillan 1997) - cont. [Chap., 4: ‘Castle Rackrent’, pp.71-107]: Hollingworth focuses on ‘the vatic nature of the text - the artist as amanuensis of John Langan’ (p.72) and examines the vernacular to reveal that it is not as ‘accidental’ or as ‘innocent’ as supposed; that the vernacular features are actually quite restricted; that they stand for an unreflective and naïve attitude on the part of the narrator, unable to assess the moral significance of what he relates (espec. the recurrent sign of undigested narrative, ‘says he’), it answers to specific political purposes; Castle Rackrent is listed under ‘Ireland’ along with political texts on the Union in Monthly Review’s ‘Monthly Catalogue’, and not with ‘novels’ (p.73.) [Cont.]

Brian Hollingworth (Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing, 1997) - cont.: Hollingworth notes that the ‘Glossary and Advertisement’ preceded the text in the first edition, and appeared more conventionally after it in later ones; challenges Watson’s interpretation of the origin of those parts in last-minute panic about the dialect (Watson, 1964, p.xx; here p.74.) Argues that the theory of an accidental origin of Castle Rackrent is not cut and dry: ‘the evidence seems to be that a text which had been begun up to ten years previously was suddenly impelled into publication […] it is difficult to believe that the publication of Castle Rackrent was as unplaced and unpremeditated as often supposed.’ (p.74.) Hollingworth identifies two separate and somewhat conflicting strategies, ‘allow[ing] the English their customary laughter’ but showing it to be an anachronism, and identifying the social problems in Ireland facing the Union; concludes that the organisation of the narrative is no more innocent than its purposes, the more so in the period of ‘urgency’ before the Union.’ (p.74.) ‘Castle Rackrent, then, was no innocent text’ (p.75.) [for longer extracts, see in RICORSO Library, “Criticism”, infra.]

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Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel with the British Empire (Princeton UP 1997), writes, among other remarks, ‘The capitalisation of Britain, funded by the booty of imperial conquest and the slave labor of the colonies, accentuated the gap between rich and poor. in the initial, optimistic period of capitalist expansion, landowners [20] depicted themselves as public benefactors. // The rise of a capitalist economy exacerbates not only the inequities of class within all sectors of British society but also the inequities of regional development. Many Scottish and Anglo-Irish landowners find themselves caught between the two developments. Those able to make new capital investments in the improvement of their properties often succeed in consolidating their local economic and political standing. Those without such investment capital, however, often suffer an acute loss of prestige and local importance […] When Maria Edgeworth and other Irish national novelists look back on the late eighteenth century, in the wake of the Union, they focus on the figure of the absentee landlord and use the return of the absentee as a catalyst or plot. Such landlords, Edgeworth argues, are driven by contradictory imperatives and loyalties; while they desert their local responsibility and make continual, unreasonable demand on their impoverished Irish tenants, in a vain bid to win status and recognition in London, English society mocks and despises them as backward representatives of a backward people. And indeed, their refusal to invest in or to supervise local development dooms their tenants to dependent poverty The only solution is [according to Edgeworth] a renewed, nationalist identification with Ireland, as a state whose marginality can be and must be reversed.’ (‘Harps Hung Upon the Willow’ [Introduction], p. 21.)

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Jacqueline Belanger, ‘Educating the Reading Public: British Critical Reception of Maria Edgeworth’s Early Irish Writing’, in Irish University Review, Autumn/Winter 1998, pp.240-55: ‘[... W]hen beginning to write Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth had been in Ireland for about eleven years; she had arrived to settle permanently at her father’s County Longford estate in 1782, aged fourteen, in an Ireland which seemed newly optimistic about the measure of parliamentary independence gained in that year. At the time she began to compose Castle Rackrent, there was little of the agrarian violence and political unreast that would culminate in the 1798 United Irishmen uprising, and it is this relatively stability which might account for the uniqueness of the story of the Rackrents in terms of the whole of Edgeworth’s body of work. The core narrative of Castle Rackrent is in many ways fee from the sense of purpose, the need to instruct and inform, present in her later Irish works. However, the editorial matter introduced after 1798 in many ways reverses this, and is perhaps indicative of Edgeworth’s developing project in representing Ireland in the light of the crucial events of the time period between 1798 and 1800.’ (p.242.) [Cont.]

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Jacqueline Belanger (‘Educating the Reading Public: British Critical Reception of Maria Edgeworth’s Early Irish Writing’, in Irish University Review, Autumn/Winter 1998) - cont.: ‘Thady Quirk, the narrator of Castle Rackrent, is anything but a “colourless” [Seamus Deane, Short History of Irish Lit., Notre Dame UP edn. 1986, p.91 - as supra] central figure through whom objective details about Ireland are filtered. The complexity of his narrative position in relation to the story he tells has resulted in a degree of critical disagreement as to Edgeworth’s attitude to the characters and events portrayed in Castle Rackrent. The presence of a framing “metatext” written by a fiction English editor further complicates any critical approaches to the text; however, it is this “metatext” [Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Irish Hunger, 1997, p.201 - as supra], addressed directly to an “ignorant English reader” [Castle Rackrent, ed. Marilyn Butler, Penguin 1992, p.63], that is crucial in revealing Edgeworth’s attitudes towards both {242} her subject matter and her audience. Initially it seems the purpose of the core narrative of the Rackrent family history was simply to tell an amusing story based on the colourful speech of a native Irish figure and to employ some of the stories and dialogue which Edgeworth and her father had heard firt-hand in their business dealings with the tenants on their County Longford estate. [Quotes letter on ‘the teller of the story .. an old steward’ - viz., John Langan.]

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Jacqueline Belanger (‘Educating the Reading Public: British Critical Reception of Maria Edgeworth’s Early Irish Writing’, in Irish University Review, Autumn/Winter 1998) - cont. ‘[...T]he “History of Sir Connolly Rackrent”, was most likely composed in 1796, as Edgeworth may have used some of her father’s parliamentary election experiences from January and February of that year to construct her text. The glossary (and preface) were most likely written in the early half of 1799; the book was published anonymously, complete with the late addition of the glossary, in January 1800. / Thus the explicitly explanatory aspects of the text - the preface, footnotes, conclusion and glossary - were added after the crucial historical point of 1798. What began as an amusing tale suddenly became less amusing in the light of the events of 1798 and the following yearts - Edgeworth seemed to have been concerned with the rather impolitic portrayal of the Irish as drunken, litigious, and generally irresponsible at a time when, if anything, it seemed necessary to protray the Irish in as positive a light as possible to an English audience in order to reconcile her English readership to the Union. (pp.242-43.)

Jacqueline Belanger (‘Educating the Reading Public: British Critical Reception of Maria Edgeworth’s Early Irish Writing’, in Irish University Review, Autumn/Winter 1998) - cont.: ‘In using an English editor to authorise “authentic” representations of the irish, Edgeworth attempts to disociate herself from the (mis)representations of the Irish as drunken and irresponsible, but in doing so places the authority to represent the Irish in the hands of the English (or Anglo-Irish). In attempting to undermine her own original narrative of the Rackrent family, Edgeworth endorses a view of the native Irish as unable to represent themselves, an idea which [244] will emerge again in her second work dealing with Ireland, the Essay on Irish Bulls. / Portraying the Irish sympathetically was for Edgeworth an imaginative attempt at a cultural union to match that in the political sphere. It was not enough to merge the tow parliaments to make the union successful; Edgeworth believed that a cultural, social and economic integration of the two countries must occur as well.’ (pp.244-45.) Further: ‘[...] Crucial to the project of introducing accurate information about Ireland is the Edgeworth’s assertion of truth and objectivity in their representations of Ireand. The guarantee of this objectivity is the assertion of Englishness: “as we were neither born nor bred in Ireland [... &c.]” (Irish Bulls, p.278.) In stating that an outsider to Ireland is somehow more capable of representing the country and the people, because unbiased by “amor patriae”, the Edgeworths attempt to guarantee the legitimacy of their own authorial position in representing Ireland.’ (p.246.) [Available at JSTOR online; accessed 23.11.2011.]

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Rolf Loeber & Magda Stouthamer-Loebber, ‘Fiction available to and written for cottages and their children’, in Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy, eds., The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives (Dublin: Rare Books Group [[…] &c.] 1999), p.147: writing in the ‘Advertisment to the Reader’ in Leadbeater’s Cottage Dialogues (1811), calls the narrative ‘an exact representation of the manner of being of the lower Irish, and a literal transcript of their language.’ (p.iv); London editions of the Cottage dialogues produced in 1811 and 1813 included appended lists of Hiberno-English usages one of which was supplied by Edgeworth. (here ftn. 113 [p.165-66]); Loeber comments: ‘Such accounts of spoken languge should only take place because the author had been in direct contact with his/her characters, and the stories were often based on real people and facts. The use of Hiberno-English by the main characters was an innovation in Irish fiction which may have been aimed at more effectively communicating improving ideas to the cottagers. Also, the Irish setting used in some of the fictional works indicated an acceptance of positive Irish attributes, without introducing the comic Irish element, known from stage plays. Further, some of the fiction was firmly embedded in the Irish countryside, and concerned Irish peasants and customs. This Irishness was expressed without denigration, and often with some admiration. Generally, these publications, although substantially differing in price, were five or six times more expensive than chapman’s books, and for that reason must have been less accessible to cottagers. […] In the case of works by Hickey and, to some extent the works by Leadbeater, the aim was to sell the works to the landlords, who in turn would distribute them at no cost to their tenants.’ (Ibid., p.149.); Further, of Parent’s Assistant (Drogheda edn. 1802), ‘[c]uriously, these authors record that Maria Edgeworth’s Parent’s assistant and other works of the kind were not supplied in Catholic diocese of Kildare and Leighlin.’ (p.150f.)

Margaret Kelleher, ‘“Philosophick Views”?: Maria Edgeworth and the Great Famine’, in Eire-Ireland 32, 1 (Spring 1997), pp.41-62, is an article of considerable breadth which draws upon Edgeworth’s lesser known works and her correspondence with, amongst others, Richard Jones, Mrs. Louisa Moore, Harriet Cruger, Dr. Joshua Harvey, Minister Bewley and Minister Pim. Kelleher writes that ‘As a famine source, the letters cast an important light on the perspective of the landholding class, resident in Ireland, whose opinions combined conservatism and enlghtened reform, revealing the deep challenges the famine posed to Edgeworth’s philosphical views.’ (p.43.) [Note: Margaret Kelleher on Edgeworth in the Irish Times - viz., "In Praise of Maria Edgeworth" (The Irish Times, 7 May 2015 - available online; accessed 08.09.2017.)

Willa Murphy, ‘A Queen of Hearts or an Old Maid?: Maria Edgeworth’s Fictions of Union’, in Dáire Keogh & Kevin Whelan, eds., Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union (Dublin: Four Courts 2001), pp.187-201: Murphy remarks: his [Richard Lovell Edgeworth] daughter’s [Maria] Irish works are frequently read as allegories of literary unionism - imaginative attempts to consecrate the union as a necessary and desireable marriage of equals […] a merger that looked rather more doutbful in the murky bogs of County Longford’. (pp.187-88.) Further: ‘The writing of Castle Rackrent was one activity that went unsupervised by the all-seeing Richard Lovell Edgeworth. And it is this text that is most complicit with the discourse of secrecy. Despite her reformist rampages against Ireland’s furtiveness, Maria Edgeworth knew well the pleasure and power associated with a good secret. In an 1803 letter to a friend, she describes compsoing stories in secret as “one of my greatest delights and strongest motives for writing.” (Quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth, p.228.) [… /] Why, then, all this secrecy in a writer committed to a union of open hearts and minds, and to a marriage of transparency? Though she never married, Maria Edgeworth arguably know something about a subservient [199] partnership in her relationship to with her father, who was described by a friend as Maria’s “father, friend, husband - he was all to her.” (pp.199-200.)

Willa Murphy, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Aesthetics of Secrecy’, in Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Tadhg Foley & Seán Ryder (Dublin: Four Courts Press 1998): Murphy argues that nineteenth-century Ireland may be understood as a secret society less because of the proliferation of actual secret societies but because secrecy and silence made way for the opening of ‘alternative spaces for enacting social and political power’ thereby turning the Irish landscape into ‘a gothic text [...] initially pleated and disguised, in which nothing as it seems.’ (pp.46-49; quoted in Gemma Walker, UG essay, UUC 2001.) [Note: ‘For Burke, as for Foucault ...’ (here p.52) is noted with misgivings by Dayan Goodsir-Cullen, in The Australian Journal of Politics and History (June 2000) [online].

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Nicola Trott, ‘Henglishwoman from Hoxfordshire’, review of Sharon Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and Romance, and Clíona O Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation, in Times Literary Supplement (6 Jan. 2005): This “romantic” author is an escape artist, whose imagination frees her fiction from its reputed obedience to parental mores. / Thus far, Sharon Murphy’s argument in Maria Edgeworth and Romance is telling and attractive; but it moves from empowering to oppressive uses of romance, a fictional mode which turns out to be as disabling for others colonial subjects - as it has been shown to be enabling for Edgeworth herself. Little attempt is made to account for this shift of perspective; and, in the absence of a fuller explanation, it is hard to see how romance can so readily double up as both a means to female liberation or the free play of the mind and an instrument of imperial or ideological control. Besides, Richard Lovell is hardly the unequivocal sponsor of didactic rationalism he needs to be for his daughter’s romancing to make its opposition felt […]. Cliona Ó Gallchoir remarks in her Maria Edgeworth, “is notorious for never addressing her audience directly, in her own voice”. Ó Gallchoir for her part addresses that indirectness as a matter of gender politics. Edgeworth would have been been surprised to find herself represented as the subaltern of Irish culture; but Ó Gallchoir means to contest the implicit chauvinism, national as well as sexual, of modern commentary which by-passes the “Henglishwoman from Hoxfordshire”. / In the process, the “prudently modified” and specifically English “Enlightenment taste” established in Butler’s account of Edgeworth has to be abandoned. In itsstead, Clíona Ó Gallchoir offers an ingenious hybridity, of Ireland with pre-and post-Revolutionary France, and elite with popular cultural forms. If Edgeworth is an “Irish” writer, she is so in ways that favour the importation into her work of French fashion, femininity and language. The effect, it is claimed, is to challenge a nation-building based on the exclusion of women from the public sphere. There are many reasons for an author’s ceasing to be regarded, perhaps, but one such exclusion occurred when Coleridge, on hearing that “the Edgeworths were most miserable when Children”, noted wryly that “the Father, in his book, is ever vapourising about their Happiness!” Practical Education was in fact a joint publication and, Maria’s name appearing first on the title page, the vapourizing, or the happiness, was manifestly hers.’ (q.p.; for full text, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index or direct.)

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Claire Connolly, ‘Irish Romanticism, 1800-1839’, in Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Cambridge UP 2006), Vol. I [Chap. 10]: ‘This period of Irish literature opens with a series of ground-clearing exercises undertaken by a young but intellectually assured writer living on her family’s estate in County Longford. Resident in Ireland from 1782, Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) had an unusually liberal upbringing, largely a result of her father’s radical educational theories, her reading in the French and Scottish Enlightenments, and the family immersion in Romantic print culture. The most respected novelist of her day and the benchmark by which new arrivals like Jane Austen and Walter Scott were judged, Edgeworth visited Britain, France and Switzerland and acquired a growing circle of influential correspondents. Her career was, however, largely lived out among family and friends in Longford, and she remained close to midlands gentry families like the Beauforts, who formed the first horizon of her readership. Edgeworth’s literary career embraced a diverse but ultimately interrelated set of concerns, all of which can be seen in embryo in her earliest publications: Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), Castle Rackrent (1800) and Belinda (1801). / Letters for Literary Ladies uncovers and scrutinises assumptions about female education and authorship. Written in mock-epistolary form with a concluding essay, the text suggests that it is only women who have the leisure to be wise and to unite different professional specialisms in the domestic sphere: this is the bedrock of national unity and a strong guarantor of social progress. Practical Education (1798) was written with Edgeworth’s father and life-long collaborator, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. It treats of education as a public issue that ought to be debated in the full light of rational inquiry, a proposition considered radical enough to atract several negative revies that focused especially on theEdgeworth’s neglect of religion. She continued to [411] works aimed at both children and educators including Moral Tales (1801), Early Lessons (1801) and The Parent’s assistant.’ [There follows remarks about Belinda (1801) considered as ‘a courtship novel that endorses the contemporary ideology of companionate marriage as the only safe foundation for domestic and social happiness’ and discussing the transgression of ‘the threshold between the private and public’ marked, in later novels, by a ‘series of extreme bodily sensations’; cont.]

Claire Connolly, ‘Irish Romanticism, 1800-1839’ (2006)- cont.: ‘[...] The preface to Edgeworth’s experimental first-person narrative, Castle Rackrent (1800), surveys established literary models and coolly considers which genre might best suit the story at hand. Nothing less than Ireland’s future in prose is at stake here: Castle Rackrent moves between established literary modes, self-consciously in search of a new style of prose fiction. Long recognised as innovative, its newness has been claimed for different traditions: the first “regional” fiction in British literature, the first distinctively Irish novel and even, according to anecdote, the first text to help George III to understand his Irish subjects (this at the very moment he decided to refuse them religious tolerance). Castle Rackrent acts as a vehicle for the point of view of an Irish servant, Thady Quirke. His opinions are expressed in an English that is heavily marked by the traces of Irish syntax and vocabulary, framed by the crisp explanatory prose of the editor’s preface, notes and glossary. / Despite his loquaciousness, the character of Thady Quirke retains a degree of ironic impenetrability that has generated a rich and varied critical response to the novel. Castle Rackrent’s framing of Thady’s voice remains a subject of critical discussions that were to become increasingly heated once the embryonic Catholic energies that Edgeworth seeks to represent found their own political voice in the early years of the twentieth century. This has led to a tendency [412] to dismiss the later Irish novels, The Absentee, Ennui and Ormond, as patrician and prescriptive fictions of progress, blind to the complex realities of Irish life. Important as part of a history of Irish cultural politics, these debates have, however, condemned readings of Edgeworth’s ironic masterpiece to tread a deply grooved but narrow-gauged circle of ideas concerning authenticity of political responsibility. Edgeworth’s experiment with voice and genre is product not only of her residence in Longford from age fifteen and her conversations with the family steward John Langan, but also of her reading Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, French moral tales and English novels.’ (p.412-13.) [Cont.]

Claire Connolly, ‘Irish Romanticism, 1800-1839’ (2006)- cont.: ‘Like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko or Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Castle Rackrent is a sophisticated fictional experiment that seeks to convey within the medium of print culture a perspective otherwise alien to a novel-reading audience. Edgeworth choice of an Irish peasant narrator is new, as is her Romantic interest orality and in the politics of language. This precise sense of language and ts political consequences finds further expression in Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), witty and self-consciously Swiftian examination of Hiberno-English usage, co-authored with her father. The text was revised in 1803 and in 1808. / All of Edgeworth’s Irish novels from Castle Rackrent onwards effect a transfer of land: property that had formerly belonged to the Williamite generation of Protestant landowners passes into the hands of Catholic (or strongly Catholic-associated) characters, as in her novels Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812) and is Ormond (1817). In each case, the mechanism of transfer is a marriage that effects an alliance between native and settler cultures. The novels end with the promise of a happier future that can be read in both domestic and national terms. This kind of doubled narrative, where sexual relations are made to relate to political ones, lends the novels an allegorical aspect that connects them most immediately to Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806). [...].’ (p.413.) [Cont.]

Claire Connolly, ‘Irish Romanticism, 1800-1839’ (2006)- cont.: ‘[...] Alongside this allegorical tendency, Edgeworth’s novels develop a realist mode that won her wide praise. Her later Irish fictions were consistently described as offering authentic images of Irish life, and praised by liberal journals like The Edinburgh Review for contributing to the great project of reforming Ireland. Such praise proved short-lived, however, and did not survive even into mid-century. Negative reviews of her father’s Memoirs (1817), combined with the masculine capturing of the novel described below, meant that Edgeworth’s reputation began to suffer severe lows. The backlash can be witnessed from as early as Patronage (1814), the publication of which was greeted with accusations of impropriety and ignorance. Edgeworth was to be dogged throughout her career by similar charges of perceived breaches of propriety, whether linguistic, political or moral, and often made revisions to the text of her novels (for collected and other editions) in order to countery accusations levelled against her in public formss like the reviews.’ (p.414.) Further quotes Alan Richardson to the effect that Edgeworth ‘helped invent modern children’s fiction’ (Richardson, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832, Cambridge UP 1994, p.7; Connolly, p.425.) [For full text, go to RICORSO Library, “Irish Critical Classics”, via index or direct.)

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Susan Manly, ‘Highlights from the Reading Room: Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’, in Echoes from the Vault, St. Andrews University Library—

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