The Absentee

Maria Edgeworth

Maria Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish novelist of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held critical views on estate management, politics, and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo. During the first decade of the 19th century she was one of the most widely read novelists in Britain and Ireland. Her name today is most commonly associated with Castle Rackrent, her first novel, in which she, while Anglican herself, used the voice of an Irish Catholic character to narrate the dissipation and decline of a family from her own landed Anglo-Irish class.