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For Maria Edgeworth, women's exclusion from professional labour frees them from the requirement to tailor their knowledge to the demands of a single specialisation: it provides them with ‘leisure to be wise’. This chapter questions the social utility of the intellectual capital that this formulation allows women to accrue. It compares accounts of female readers with their male counterparts, asking how the issue of gender helps to distinguish leisured wisdom from unproductive indolence. Using the example of Edgeworth's Belinda, it revisits the idea of reading as symbolic labour, attending both to its positive agency and its limitations.

This chapter considers the relationship between Irish fiction and Empire under the Union and in its aftermath. In Ireland's first major novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), Maria Edgeworth memorably anticipated a successful Union with Britain; thereafter, a rapid succession of works obsessively circled around the Act of Union's failure to resolve the matter of Ireland's ambiguous colonial status. The novels appear as repositories of British colonial assumptions and expressions of anti-British sentiment. As the straitened conditions of nineteenth and early twentieth-century artists and writers working in an economically and politically depressed former capital increased movement outward, the island's historic ties, not only with London, but also with a continental Catholicism, established France and Italy as fictional settings providing alternative perspectives on British imperialism. Such geographically expansive settings for Empire discourse suggest, once again, how Irish fiction significantly complicates the binary structures of a postcolonial emphasis on metropolitan centre and periphery.

From Sweden, Staël returns to London after an absence of twenty years, conferring with Whigs (for their liberalism rather than their pro-Napoleonism) and the ruling Tories, enjoying her celebrity, and increasing it with the triumphant publication in French and English of De l'Allemagne. Fanny Burney, who greatly admires Staël's latest book, continues to regret the impossibility of meeting her, and Maria Edgeworth likewise; Byron, another enthusiast for the work, watches her ‘perform’ in society with both scorn and amusement, while statesmen are more or less shocked by her boldness in advising them how to handle war and peace. She enjoys her fame, but longs for Paris and French conversation; continuing to provoke both disapproval and interest, she finds that her foreignness excuses some of her social faux-pas but not others. The abolitionist Wilberforce becomes a friend, and she promises with Wellington to help propagate his writings in France.

This chapter argues that establishing an origin for what we now call ‘British realism’ or ‘the Irish novel’ is both an institutional and an anachronistic endeavour: the stories that we tell about novels are actually stories about the cultural institutions that study novels. Considering the formal and political divisions of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent alongside its changing critical reception, the chapter demonstrates how ‘British realism’ is an anachronistic formation and offers a new origin story where ‘British realism’ and ‘the Irish novel’ are not separate traditions or forms, but rather dynamically intertwined. Castle Rackrent, long thought to be an exemplary Irish novel precisely because it is not realist, develops realist contradictions that are taken up by later nineteenth-century Irish, Scottish and English novelists like Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope.

Maria Edgeworth, at one time the most prominent novelist writing in English, had a long and varied career. In works explicitly designed for different classes of readers, Edgeworth manifested a sustained interest in relationships between writing and social position. Her fiction often connects literacy and social mobility, and uses copying to represent access to social power. Copying is also an element in Edgeworth’s conception of herself as author. In Edgeworth’s final novel, Helen, a concern with copying is accompanied by an interest in the contemporary cult of the autograph, which the novel uses to explore the proper limits of celebrity and the commodification of the author in the market place. Walter Scott figures significantly in the novel. Edgeworth’s relationship with Scott, her interest in issues relating to Scott’s hand, and the sale of the Waverly manuscripts at public auction are a suggestive context for Edgeworth’s reflective treatment of modern authorship.

The final chapter argues that the questions about women and the civilizing process first raised in the relatively elite milieu of Montagu’s Bluestocking salons migrated into the popular fiction of the Romantic era, shaping conversations about women and historical progress into the nineteenth century. The term conjectural fiction borrows from Dugald Stewart’s term “conjectural history,” which describes the stadial method of historiography developed during the Scottish Enlightenment. Conjectural fiction highlights Regina Maria Roche and Maria Edgeworth’s use of the feminine and aesthetic categories of delicacy, elegance, and beauty to gauge changing historical and economic conditions in their fiction. This comparative approach to charting progress also migrated into aesthetic theories from the same period, including Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), Lord Kames’s Essay on Criticism (1762), and Dugald Stewart’s Essay on Taste (1810).

This chapter compares dandyism in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern literature, focusing on Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn. It argues that in these two texts, considered as foundational in the Irish big house and southern plantation novel traditions, the dandy figure's cultural and sexual decadence threatens colonial aristocracy. The chapter suggests that a common merger of aesthetics and proactive reform links the Anglo-Irish big house and Southern plantation novel literary traditions from their inception.

This chapter explores a contradiction at the heart of the mainstream abolitionist movement: colonialism in India was promoted as a solution to the problem of slavery. It focuses on forms of unfreedom that trouble the geographical divide drawn in abolitionist discourse between slavery and freedom within the British empire. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Marianna Starke's pro-imperialism/antislavery drama (set in India), The Sword of Peace (1788). It then turns to Maria Edgeworth's anti-Jacobin short-story collection Popular Tales (1804), which features nearly identical scenes of slavery set in Jamaica and India. Edgeworth's fiction might seem worlds away from actual colonial policy; but by contextualizing her writing amid debates about the slave trade and proposals for the cultivation of sugar in Bengal, the chapter shows that her stories were important and highly regarded thought experiments in colonial governance. Finally, the chapter discusses an important historical instantiation of the Indies mentality that falls outside the time frame of this study: the transportation of Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean in the 1830s.

Lord Glenthorn, of Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809), suffers with a debilitating apathy and indifference unless continuously stimulated by external factors. Robin Runia reads this symptomatology within the frame of late eighteenth-century definitions of hypochondriasis, which firmly associated the condition not just with the indolence of the wealthy but also with a foreign decadence. Trying to rid himself of his ennui, Glenthorn trials numerous fashionable activities of the wealthy but finds consolation only in the domestic sphere and the peaceable routines of his servants. Ennui is Edgeworth’s critique of the ‘rampant moral plague of luxury’, but, more importantly in offering a domestic remedy based on duty and the importance of home, it associates the health of the male body with the knowledge and culture of women.

This chapter argues that authors of Irish Romantic novels and national tales, such as Maria Edgeworth and John and Michael Banim, are not only concerned with the extent to which their novels sought to copy from Irish culture but are also worried about the slightness of the novel form in relation to the copiousness of that culture. Such concerns led to attempts by Thomas Crofton Croker and others to add texture and tactility to their depictions of the Irish past, through antiquarian methodologies but also facsimiles, lithography, and other developments in print culture. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which Irish literary texts were concerned not only to accurately and minutely detail the past, but also to adduce evidence of such historical and cultural authenticity, working against teleological accounts of the birth of the modern historical method, which see Romantic history as unconcerned with the evidentiary foundations of the past.

Thischapter reverses critical understandings of Maria Edgeworth’s representation of Paris in her last Irish Tale, which have often characterized the scenes in France as an interlude. Instead, this analysis reveals the complex role Paris plays in positioning Edgeworth’s writings in dialogue with the leading ideas of the French Enlightenment, especially those of the Abbé Morellet. Ormond’s Bildung becomes a rejection of speculative investments in favour of a more socially responsible form of economics.