ABSTRACT
Maria Edgeworth’s contemporaries recognized her as a leading woman novelist of her moment. Edgeworth’s own correspondence provides an important starting point for the formulation of a more accurate and complex understanding of Edgeworth’s work. Scholarship from the second half of the twentieth century early set the terms for critical debating of Edgeworth. Walter Allen, in The English Novel, writes: Miss Edgeworth’s characters are free up to a point; but they are still tethered to their creator. Edgeworth’s moralizing becomes important as an example of racialized thinking in novel form. The real exception to prove the rule of Edgeworth’s pigeon-holing through modern editions is The Works of Maria Edgeworth in twelve volumes. Criticism has remained limited in focus, and much irreconcilable ink has been spilt on the topics of gender and politics in a fairly limited number of Edgeworth’s works. Edgeworth’s correspondence is also valuable in helping to reconsider her relationship to other women writers from her period.
