ABSTRACT
The literary production of Maria Edgeworth final novel, Helen, reveals that Maria Edgeworth's relationships with wom significantly contributed to her development as a writer and as a person. In its theme and its composition, then, Helen underscores the ways in which a strong community of women interrogates and subverts assumptions about women's reliance upon and suppression by men. Helen tells the story of the orphaned eponymous character who, upon he guardian's death, moves in with her childhood friend, Lady Cecilia and Cecilia' rigid husband. Gilbert and Gubar similarly suggest that Maria Edgeworth's authorial voice undermined her father's patriarchal control. In her father's lifetime, when she came up to London, she was like a sealed fountain; but now, being on her own bottom, she pours down like the falls of Niagara. Edgeworth wrote Helen from within her own community of women, demonstrating how women can and do achieve a 'large portion of happiness, productivity and dignity, with or without men.
