Bøker av Maria Edgeworth

Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) was an Anglo-Irish novelist. "Castle Rackrent" (1800) was her first novel.

Maria Edgeworth was a pioneer of realist children's literature. This critical edition reveals the range of her writing for children, ranging from stories for very young children to tales for young adults, and includes The Purple Jar, The Good Aunt and The Grateful Negro. Annotated with a comprehensive introduction based on original research.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth's influential two-volume work of 1788, written with his daughter Maria, derives its authority and innovative features from Edgeworth's own experiences of raising twenty children. Arguing for the formative character of early childhood experiences in general, Volume 1 deals with areas including play, obedience and learning.

One of the foremost authors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) made the project of women's education the pillar of her career. Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), her first published work, takes up this question in earnest, offering a staunch defence of women's intellectual training and an impassioned warning against its neglect. The first two letters likely draw from an exchange between Richard Edgeworth, Maria's father, and his friend Thomas Day, presenting arguments for and against educating young women in the sciences and philosophy. The 'Letters of Julia and Caroline' illustrate this debate in epistolary form, dramatising both sides of the argument. The final 'Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification' serves as a wry critique of women's own self-deceptions. Complex and provocative, Letters for Literary Ladies demonstrates Edgeworth's early exploration of the subject that would define her career.

With her satire on Anglo-Irish landlords in Castle Rackrent (1800), Maria Edgeworth pioneered the regional novel and inspired Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814).

This novel is the personal narrative of a recovering anti-Semite, a young man whose phobia of Jews is instilled in early childhood and who must unlearn his irrational prejudice when he falls in love with the daughter of a Spanish Jew. Edgeworth attempts to challenge prejudice and to show how literary representations affect public policy.

Thady Quirk, devoted steward to the decaying estate of the Rackrent family, narrates a riotous story of four generations of a dying dynasty in Castle Rackrent (1800). Thady will defend his masters to the end, but eventually his naivety and blind loyalty cause him to ignore the warning signs as the family's excesses lead them to ruin. This volume also includes Ennui, the entertaining 'confessions' of the Earl of Glenthorn, a bored, spoiled aristocrat. Desperate to be free from 'the demon of ennui', Glenthorn's quest for happiness takes him through violence and revolution, and leads to intriguing twists of fate. Both novels offer a darkly comic and satirical expos of the Irish class system, and a portrait of a nation in turmoil.