Castle Rackrent, a short novel by Maria Edgeworth published in 1800, is often regarded as the first historical novel, the first regional novel in English, the first Anglo-Irish novel, the first Big House novel and the first saga novel.
This sentimental novel, which has notions of sensibility and early romanticism, satirizes the society in which it is set and is a significant precursor to the work of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, whose novels explore many of the same issues.
She was the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (who eventually fathered 22 children by four wives) and Anna Maria Edgeworth (née Elers); Maria was thus an aunt of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth.
Practical Education is an educational treatise written by Maria Edgeworth and her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth.
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Maria Edgeworth's first extended work of fiction, the pioneering historical novel with an Irish setting Castle Rackrent, is published anonymously in London.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists examples of usage from 1709 (Richard Steele in the Tatler), 1771 (Samuel Foote in Maid of Bath), 1821 (Maria Edgeworth in a letter), 1831 (Walter Scott in his journal), 1929 (I. Colvin in his Life of Dyer), and 1992 (Jeff Torrington in Swing Hammer Swing!), the last likely used humorously.
He was educated at a school at Edgeworthstown under Lovell Edgeworth, a brother of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, and afterwards at Dublin at a school run by the Rev. William Jones.
Maria Edgeworth (1776-1849) was another prominent author of moral tales, writing about how a wise adult can educate a child; one of her more famous stories is “The Purple Jar.”
He was distantly related to the Courtenay family who held the title Earls of Devon and were seated at Powderham Castle in Exeter, and was a distant cousin to the novelist Maria Edgeworth, but his own family was not well-to-do.
He was the son of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his third wife Elizabeth, making him one of a very large Anglo-Irish family, including the novelist Maria Edgeworth.
The Absentee is a novel by Maria Edgeworth, published in 1812 in Tales of Fashionable Life.
Maria Edgeworth, in an 1810 letter to Mrs. Ruxton, claims that the bachelor was modeled on a Mr. Harford of Blaise Castle.
"A Menstrual Lesson for Girls: Maria Edgeworth's "The Purple Jar," in Menstruation A Cultural History edited by Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie.