Subjects
The Works of Maria Edgeworth
General Editor: Marilyn Butler
Volume Editors: Marilyn Butler, Connor Carville, Claire Connolly, Jane Desmarais, Elizabeth Eger, Siobhán Kilfeather, Susan Manly, Tim McLoughlin, Clíona ÓGallchoir, Heidi Van de Veire and Kim Walker
The Pickering Masters
978 1 85196 188 7: 234x156mm: £566.67/$950.00
978 1 85196 189 4: 234x156mm: £283.33/$475.00
978 1 85196 186 3: 234x156mm: £850.00/$1425.00
This new 12-volume edition of the major works of Maria Edgeworth makes available one of the most important but most neglected of women writers in English.
Born in England in 1768 of an English mother and an Anglo-Irish father, Edgeworth lived from the age of 14 on her father's estate in the Irish Midlands. She was introduced by her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, inventor, educationalist and Enlightenment polymath, to a remarkable range of books and current ideas. Her sparkling comedies of high-life English manners influenced Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.
Her four remarkable Irish tales, beginning with Castle Rackrent (1800), initiate the national or regional novel, which feeds the nineteenth-century historical novel and the modern post-colonial novel. The fiction she wrote herself for and about children, which stayed in print for more than a century, remains among the very best of its kind. The educational treatises, handbooks and teaching materials she wrote in collaboration with R L Edgeworth are part of her period's breakthrough in understanding of the world of childhood.
This first collected edition since the nineteenth century makes available to scholars, students and general readers all the major fiction for adults, much of the best of juvenile fiction, and a generous selection of the educational and occasional writings of Maria Edgeworth.
This edition restores to prominence Jane Austen's leading contemporary rival – a comic, original and often brilliant analyst of her world whose work John Ruskin declared, constituted 'the most re-readable books in existence'.
Contents
Volume 1
Edited by Jane Desmarais, Tim McLoughlin and Marilyn Butler
General Introduction; Textual Note; Introductory Note; Castle Rackrent (1800); Irish Bulls (1802); Ennui (1809); Endnotes; Textual Variants
Castle Rackrent Edgeworth's first and best known novel. Acclaimed as the pioneer novel in English, Edgeworth demonstrates a sparkling sensitivity to her complex range of characters: her field here is the life of the 'big house' late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland, seen through the declining Rackrents and the self-reforming Lord Glenthorn. The introduction and notes provide a fresh and detailed appreciation of the writer's allusive powers, her immersion in the events and newspapers of the day, her European consciousness, and her ironic commentary on Irish-English relations.
Volume 2
Edited by Siobhán Kilfeather
Introductory Note; Abbreviations; Belinda (1801); Endnotes; Textual Variants; Appendix 1; Appendix 2
Belinda is one of the finest, most complex of Edgeworth's works of fiction and probably the closest to those of her younger contemporary, Jane Austen. Austen singles it out in Northanger Abbey (c. 1803, pub. 1818) as one of the three best English novels. ‘It is only…Belinda…only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of it's varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.’
Volume 3
Edited by Marilyn Butler and Susan Manly
Introductory Note; Leonora (1806); Harrington (1817); Endnotes; Textual Variants
The two short novels of rare quality, both tackling themes particularly difficult for women authors. Leonora is an epistolary novel, similar to Austen's Lady Susan, centred on a sexual adventuress. Harrington is a dramatisation of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. The opening chapters, which narrate the nightmarish episodes of the hero's disturbed childhood are the best of their kind before Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist. The novel is a response to a letter from an American Jewish woman which criticised Edgeworth's portrayal of Jews in previous works of fiction, particularly in her children's stories.
Volume 4
Claire Connolly with Marilyn Butler
Introductory Note; Manoeuvring (1809); Vivian (1812); Endnotes; Textual Variants
Manoeuvring is a witty tale which examines the vagaries of marriage. The narrative pays particular attention to women's conversational strategies and verbal manoeuvres. Vivian considers the power of education, and asks if good instruction can be enough in itself. The plot dramatises questions of family, relationships, marriage and individual responsibility.
Volume 5
Edited by Helen Van de Veire and Kim Walker with Marilyn Butler
Introductory Note; The Absentee (1812); Madame de Fleury (1809); Emilie de Coulanges (1812); Endnotes; Textual Note; Textual Variants
The Absentee is one of the Irish tales and Edgeworth's personal favourite. This volume brings together two of the writer's moral tales, Madame de Fleury and Emilie de Coulanges, neither of which have been published before in an annotated edition. All three of these tales belong to the Tales of Fashionable Life, in which Edgeworth attempts to reform the higher echelons by evoking their pettiness and their excesses.
Volumes 6 & 7
Edited by Connor Carville and Marilyn Butler
Introductory Note; Patronage (1814); Endnotes; Textual Variants
Patronage is a long and complex novel of ideas, in which high politics, male careerism, female integrity, and the slow intrusion of the past into the present all combine in a richly narrated story set in England but implicating continental and Irish affairs. It met with a hostile reception which greatly affected subsequent editions. Here the first edition is re-published for the first time.
Volume 8
Edited by Claire Connolly
Introductory Note; Ormond (1817); Endnotes; Textual Variants
Ormond, last of Edgeworth's major studies of Ireland, asks whether justice or generosity is the better means of managing an estate. It occupies an important place in Edgeworth's sustained speculations on education and identity. Its hero is one of Edgeworth's best-drawn characters, and its techniques reflect the growing sophistication of Edgeworth's writing in later years.
Volume 9
Edited by Susan Manly and Clíona ÓGallchoir
Introductory Note; Helen (1834); Endnotes; Textual Variants
The last of her novels, Helen, was much admired in the nineteenth century. It is, for example, an important source for Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. As a tale of deception and intrigue, it is both psychologically searching and stylistically complex, and deserves a much wider audience amongst feminist critics and scholars of the nineteenth century alike. This edition is based upon the first edition of 1834 and the manuscript copy in the British Museum.
Volume 10
Edited by Elizabeth Eger and Clíona ÓGallchoir
Selected short fiction
Introductory Note; ‘Preface’, ‘Lazy Lawrence’, ‘Waste Not, Want Not’, ‘Forgive and Forget’, ‘Simple Susan’, ‘The Mimic’, ‘The Orphans’, ‘The Basket Woman’, ‘The White Pigeon’, The Parent’s Assistant (1800); ‘Forester’, ‘Angelina’, Moral Tales for Young People (1801); Endnotes; Textual Variants
These are Edgeworth’s non pedagogical tales for children. They are pioneering evocations of the world of the child, as seen thought the eyes of children themselves.
Volume 11
Edited by Susan Manly
Introductory note; Acknowledgments and Dedication; Practical Education (1798); Index; Endnotes; Textual Variants; Plates
Practical Education is co-authored by Maria's father Richard Lovell Edgeworth. The Edgeworth's educational method was worked out within a large family, not by R L Edgeworth alone but by a team including three of his four wives and several of his older children, headed by Maria. Its careful testing and recording of lessons makes it both a teaching manual and a pioneering classic of modern pedagogy, and it won an immediate reputation on the continent as well as in Britain.
Volume 12
Edited by Elizabeth Eger, Clíona ÓGallchoir and Marilyn Butler
Introductory Note; ‘Lame Jervas’, ‘The Grateful Negro’, Popular Tales (1804); ‘Harry and Lucy’, ‘Rosamond’, ‘Frank’, ‘The Little Dog Trusty’, ‘The Orange Man’, ‘The Cherry Orchard’, Early Lessons (1801); Endnotes; Textual Variants; Manuscript Material Introductory Note; Whim for Whim (1798); Endnotes; List of Errata; Index
In addition to writing much of Practical Education herself, Maria Edgeworth’s main literary contribution to the family’s educational project are her fresh, often surprisingly up-to-date ‘Lessons’ on all subjects, published in 1801 under the collective title Early Lessons.
Reviews
'a heroic undertaking...Maria has found her voice again'
– Hugh Parry, Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society Journal