[2] She held critical views on estate management, politics, and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo.

Her name today is most commonly associated with Castle Rackrent, her first novel, in which she adopted an Irish Catholic voice to narrate the dissipation and decline of a family from her own landed Anglo-Irish class.

[3] She spent her early years with her mother's family in England, living at The Limes (now known as Edgeworth House) in Northchurch, by Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire.

[4][5] Her mother died when Maria was five, and when her father married his second wife Honora Sneyd in 1773, she went with him to his estate, Edgeworthstown, in County Longford, Ireland.

[1] Returning home at the age of 14, she took charge of her many younger siblings[7] and was home-tutored in law, Irish economics and politics, science, and literature by her father.

[citation needed] She became her father's assistant in managing the Edgeworthstown estate, which had become run-down during the family's 1777–1782 absence; she would live and write there for the rest of her life.

She also mixed with the Anglo-Irish gentry, particularly Kitty Pakenham (later the wife of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington), Lady Moira, and her aunt Margaret Ruxton of Blackcastle.

[10] On a visit to London in 1813, where she was received as a literary lion, Maria met Lord Byron (whom she disliked) and Humphry Davy.

She entered into a long correspondence with the ultra-Tory Sir Walter Scott after the publication of Waverley in 1814, in which he gratefully acknowledged her influence, and they formed a lasting friendship.

[11] A counter view was provided by another visitor who stated that the residents of Edgeworthstown treated Edgeworth with contempt, refusing even to feign politeness.

After debating the issue with the economist David Ricardo, Maria came to believe that better management and the further application of science to agriculture would raise food production and lower prices.

[1] Though Maria Edgeworth spent most of her childhood in England, her life in Ireland had a profound impact on both her thinking and views on Irish culture.

Fauske and Kaufman conclude, "[She] used her fiction to address the inherent problems of acts delineated by religious, national, racial, class based, sexual, and gendered identities".

[citation needed] In her works, Edgeworth created a nostalgic and imagined Irish past in an attempt to celebrate the culture of Ireland.

Academic Suvendrini Perera argued Edgeworth's novels traced "the gradual anglicanization of feudal Irish society".

[23] Irish novelist Seamus Deane connected Edgeworth's depiction of Ireland and its relationship to Britain as being in line with wider Enlightenment ideals, noting that Edgeworth "was not the first novelist to have chosen Ireland as her ‘scene’; but she was the first to realize that there was, within it, a missionary opportunity to convert it to Enlightenment faith and rescue it from its ‘romantic’ conditions".

[24] Edgeworth's writing on Ireland, especially her early Irish stories, offer an important rearticulation of Burkean local attachment and philosophical cosmopolitanism to produce an understanding of the nation as neither tightly bordered (like nations based on historical premises such as blood or inheritance) or not borderless (like those based on rational notions of universal inclusion).

[25] More specifically, a slow process of education instils transnational understanding in the Irish people while retaining the bonds of local attachment by which the nation is secured.

In the book's 25 chapters, she presages modern improvements to age-related educational materials, for example: in geography, maps bordered with suitable illustrated biographies; in chronology, something "besides merely committing names and dates to memory"; in chemistry, safe chemical experiments that children might undertake.

[32] To help illustrate the care that must be taken in teaching children and to emphasise the necessity of properly directing and managing their attentiveness, Maria Edgeworth drew several comparisons with non-European peoples.

[34] In particular, The Double Disguise signals Edgeworth's turn toward realism and is now considered a seminal regional narrative predating Castle Rackrent (1800).

This work was a response to Thomas Day's, a member of the Lunar Society, belief that women should not be authors or taught to think.

[10] This was followed in 1796 by her first children's book, The Parent's Assistant, which included Edgeworth's celebrated short story "The Purple Jar".

Edgeworth asserts that "learning should be a positive experience and that the discipline of education is more important during the formative years than the acquisition of knowledge".

It is narrated by an Irish catholic worker on the estate, named Thady Quirk, and portrayed the rise of the catholic-Irish middle class.

[1] Her novel is also set in England, a conscious choice as Edgeworth found Ireland too troubling for a fictitious work in the political climate of the 1830s.

A close analysis of the alterations which Edgeworth's style underwent when it was pressed into the service of overt didacticism should serve to illuminate the relationship between prose technique and didactic purpose in her work.

[48] The convention which Maria Edgeworth has adopted and worked to death is basic to the eighteenth-century novel, but its roots lie in the drama, tracing at least to the Renaissance separation of high and low characters by their forms of speech.

[48] The characteristic of Edgeworth is to connect an identifiable strain of formal realism, both philosophical and rhetorical, and therefore display an objective interest in human nature and the way it manifests itself in social custom.

[49] One would expect this from Edgeworth, an author whose didacticism often has struck modern readers as either gendered liability, technical regression, or familial obligation.