Edgeworth, Maria

Matthew Nunez 1B

Edgeworth Maria 1768-1849

Edgeworth, was educated in English Boarding schools before her father moved her and her family to Ireland. There she taught her younger siblings (22 children in her family), and began to study politics and economics. Her first work “Letters for Literary Ladies” was a work defending women’s education.

After she was already successful as a writer, she grew increasingly interested in the vanishing way of life in rural Ireland. She began to represent her fiction in the style of Irish Folklore and culture in order to bring to the forefront social issues such as the prejudice that the Irish faced since the English conquered Ireland.

Her story “The Irish Incognito”(1802) is a meditation of the precariousness of individual identity, and also addresses the topic of discrimination felt by the non-English peoples of Britain.