Some people
die and are buried, and a gravestone marks them for a kind of immortality. Some
people deserve real immortality, but they die, and they don't just get buried
in the ground, they get buried in some obscure corner of the vaults of
historical memory, and that is it, and them, done, forgotten, might as well not
have bothered to expend all that creative energy... and then, suddenly, someone
comes along and rediscovers them, and they are reborn... so I am including here
Maria Edgeworth, Anglo-Irish writer, known for her children’s stories and for her novels of Irish life. The Maria Edgeworth Centre is at Ballymahon Rd, Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, N39 E3C8, and online here. The same website has a subpage entitled
https://mariaedgeworthcenter.com/meet-the-edgeworths/education/
though this is more about her father than about her. More bio and books here, and especially about her impact on Walter Scott and Jane Austen: a letter of 1814 from the latter to a niece who likewise fancied herself as one day being a published author and had written asking for guidance, simply states: "I have made up my mind to like no Novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, Yours & my own", and can be found here.
Amongst her own wittier attempts to make sense of her life, this:
“A mother with four daughters
is not uncommon in the history of the world; a daughter with four mothers is
practically unique.”
But
so it was with Maria Edgeworth. Born
on Jan 1 1768 - Britannica has 1767, but all the
specialist sites agree 1768 - her one-and-only father was Richard
Lovell Edgeworth, a renowned inventor and writer, and her
biological mother was Anna
Maria née Elers. But biological mum died when she was only five, and
three months later non-biological mum Honora Sneyd replaced her, only to fall so ill just two
years later that Maria was sent away
to boarding school. Seven years on and stepmother died, though her sister Elizabeth had barely
completed the walk back from the graveside before she was re-dressed and
re-walking, this time down the aisle.
Fourteen
years, three mums, two boarding school headmistresses... one sibling older than
herself but married off already, several younger and placed in her charge, with
several more to follow... enough to turn a serious-minded woman to poetry in
order to staunch, or at least to tourniquet, the blood-jet. But you have to be
able to see if you are going to write poetry, and Ms
Edgeworth was in serious danger of becoming Ms Milton when she picked up a severe eye
infection in 1781.
But
let me go back a moment, because I fear I have rushed this: she was actually born
in Blackbourton, in Oxfordshire, but spent the pre-boarding school years at her
mother’s family home, “The Limes”, the one that is now known as Edgeworth House,
in Northchurch, near Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. But dad was in a bad state
over two dead wives and now an afflicted second daughter, and did what most of
us would do: he went home to mummy. To the town from which he took his name, a
very badly neglected estate that frankly needed his presence and attention, to Edgeworthstown,
in County Longford, in Eireland.
So
it was that, aged just fourteen and removed from boarding school, Maria became her father’s chief assistant, running the
day-to-day affairs of estate management, when she had time between her numerous
younger siblings - twenty-one in total, by the time fourth-mum had menopaused.
Fourth mum - Elizabeth
surrendered to the same consumption that had killed her sister, in 1797, and
again dad wasted little time acquiring a new wife. This time Frances Anne Beaufort, the sister of Sir Francis Beaufort, the man who blew the
Beaufort Scale into existence. She was a year younger than Maria, which must have engendered a very
strange relationship: hello this is my best friend, though she’s also my
step-mother. Best friend and lifelong confidante; two equally remarkable women,
the step-mum a very talented botanical artist - she met papa-Richard when she
created some illustrations for Maria’s
children’s book "The Parent’s Assistant" - and herself the author of a
fascinating memoir (click here).
Dad
may have spent a lot of his active life in bed, but there were still plenty of
hours of daylight in which to engage his mind as well. He was a fervent
believer in education for girls as much as boys, regarded science, mathematics and philosophy as the core curriculum, and was himself a prolific inventor and
writer, who even collaborated with Maria
on numerous of her books.
Nor
was fourth mum less poetikally engaged, and in fact it was she rather than
hubby who suggested making the Grand Tour which would lead, during their visit
to Paris, to Maria’s one and only marriage
proposal, from a Swedish courtier named Count Edelcrantz.
From hints in several of her books, she probably did rather fancy the idea, but
said no anyway. Books, siblings and estate management, though probably not in
that order of priority, had already married her to Edgeworthstown.
I
mentioned Walter Scott and Jane Austen among her home correspondents; add
Fanny Burney and
Charles Babbage to that list.
Overseas there were many others, all the way east to India and west to the
Americas, where the most frequent was Rachel Mordecai Lazarus,
a Jewish educator.
She
wrote that first book while still a teenager, and never stopped. The novels
were what drew Scott and Austen and Burney,
the educational texts Babbage and Lazarus, though sadly it is for the children’s
books that she is remembered, if at all, today – and not totally unfairly,
because no one had really written children’s books as such before her, so count
her among the pioneers, alongside the Grimm
brothers, though they were a full ten years behind her.
The list of works
(to name but a few) include: "Letters for Literary Ladies" (1795); "Practical
Education" (1798); "The Parent’s Assistant" (1796); "Castle Rackrent" (1800), her
breakthrough, exploring Irish history and class struggles; "Belinda" (1801); "The
Moral Tales" series (1801-1805); "Ennui" (1809); "The Absentee" (1812); "Patronage" (1814); "Harrington" (1817); "Ormond" (1817); "Helen" (1834); "Orlandino" (1848) (I wonder if Virginia Woolf had read it? you can, here).
Like
Jane Austen, and like early Mary Anne Evans,
her novels tend to look like romances until you register the use of language
and the content of the dialogues: themes of social reform, education, and
cultural differences sneaked in between the husband-seeking, the vicar-visits,
and the moaning about lazy servants.
Dad
died in 1817, and she grieved for him as though she had lost a pseudo-husband,
putting down her own pen in order to take up his, and completing his “Memoirs”
on his behalf in 1820. The rest of her life was spent managing the estate,
though she didn’t need the income – she was selling more copies than Jane Austen, even at the latter’s height.
“Managing
the estate” is anyway a euphemism, for “seeing if she could put into practice
some of the theories she and her father had spent years developing”. The living
standards of the underprivileged residents in Edgeworthstown were her first
priority. Easy. Done in just a few rearranged work contracts. Schools that
catered to children from all religious backgrounds took rather longer, in a
land so sadly torn between Catholics and Protestants, and a small Jewish
community for which Rahel Lazarus was
able to provide some quite precise guidance.
She
also functioned, semi-officially, as principal advisor on Literature to William
Rowan Hamilton, the President of the Royal Irish Academy. In
1837 she was made an honorary member.
Then
came the famine of 1846, and those who remember how Beatle George
Harrison responded to the crisis in Bangladesh, and Bob Geldof
to the one in Eritrea, will recognise the extraordinariness of her efforts to assist
not just those on her own estate, but across the whole of Eireland. She even
took up writing again, penning her final book, “Orlandino”, purely to raise money
for the Relief Fund.
She
suffered a heart attack in Edgeworthstown on May
22 1849 and was buried beside her father in the family vault in the
Churchyard of St. Johns.
Richard Wagner - born today, 1813; life here; my rendition of his Ring-Cycle in English narrative here.
And today in 1972, Ceylon was declared a republic and changed its name to Sri Lanka (why was it ever called Ceylon in the first place when its ancient name was...? actually there have been several... and what does Sri Lanka mean? - answers in The World Hourglass)
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