Maria Edgeworth and romance

Abstract

This dissertation concentrates upon an important tension manifest across Edgeworth’s prolific writings, and it contends that this tension finally illustrates her unease with the didactic tenets that she (overtly) promoted throughout her work. At issue in ail of Edgeworth’s works is the preoccupation with what it means to be an individual in terms of the ‘new-style patriarchy’ that was emerging at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Edgeworth, this question is inextricably linked to the biographical details of her own life, in particular, to the type of patriarchal authority that her father asserted over his family. While writing texts explicitly designed to illustrate and to celebrate her father’s educational theories, Edgeworth at the same time encodes in her works her concerns regarding the efficacy, or ‘truth’, of this ideology. Specifically, she reveals her perception that man is much more than a rational being and that allowances must be made for the effects of both his passions and his imaginative life. In this context, I argue that Edgeworth’s works effectively operate upon two levels, the didactic level, which promotes the rationalist ideology of her father and her age, and, the subversive level, which interrogates or qualifies the didactic message of her texts. Significantly, both of these levels are curiously informed by her use of romance. On the one hand, Edgeworth’s work (overtly) unfolds a vision of reality that is based upon a distinctly rational ideology, and it implies that, in order to be useful and happy, the individual must cultivate his/her reason and reject the delusions of romance in favour of rational knowledge. On the other, though, Edgeworth’s texts draw heavily upon romance conventions in order to advance this argument and in so doing (covertly) admit not only the power and pleasure, but also the crucial necessity of the imaginative life. It is only by recognizing this that we can properly begin to appreciate Edgeworth’s motivations and achievements as a writer. Drawing widely upon all aspects of Edgeworth’s writing, this dissertation therefore traces how Edgeworth’s use of romance both promotes and interrogates a view of reality