irish writer maria edgeworth

Maria was the descendant of one Francis Edgeworth who had come to Ireland in 1585. About twenty-five years later he was given a grant of 60 acres around the town of Mostrim, now Edgeworthstown, in the midland county of Longford, as part of the policy of King James I of settling English Protestants on lands confiscated from Irish Catholics. In the beginning the family lived in the castle of Crannelagh near Edgeworthstown, going each summer to a residence at Kilshrewly in the same county, but both were subsequently destroyed by fire. By the early eighteenth century, a house was built at Edgeworthstown by Maria's grandfather, who structured it from one chimney that survived of a former building. During Maria's early life, the family lived in England and it was not until she was fifteen that she came to live in Edgeworthstown on a permanent basis. Her first mature impressions of the house where she was to live almost all her life were unforgettable; though it was June, there was snow on the roses in the garden when they arrived. She grew to love the place best in spring and early summer when the lilacs and laburnums were in bloom and when, from the upstairs windows, she could see the peonies and rhododendrons in the garden below. The Edgeworths were substantial landlords and Richard Lovell threw himself enthusiastically into the management of his estates, seeking to build up a relationship with his tenants by doing away with middlemen and collecting the rents himself. In his spare time he worked on his inventions which included an early model of the telegraph and an attempt to create a wooden horse capable of jumping stone walls. He was the head of a happy and ever-increasing family, once boasting to a friend that neither tears nor the voice of reproof nor the hand of restraint were regular events in his house. It was in this environment that Maria began her career as a writer. She wrote virtually all her books at Edgeworthstown, including Castle Rackrent, Tales of Fashionable Life, Patronage and Ormond. Though in her lifetime she knew such literary figures as Lord Byron and Madame Recamier and was visited in County Loongford by Sir Walter Scott and Wordsworth, she was essentially a home-lover with no desire to travel abroad. The world she loved best was that contained in the house at Edgeworthstown. From the family memoirs garnered together in The Black Book of Edgeworthstown we have a vivid description of what the house was like in Maria's day. It had being comfortable rooms full of books, maps and clocks, and the central hall, with its stuffed birds and curiosities brought home from abroad, was hung with family portraits. Marie was over eighty when she died. She was survived by her stepmother, Frances Beaufort, whom she loved dearly and who wrote of her: 'She was gone, and nothing like her can we ever see again in this world'. Maria is buried with her forbears in the little churchyard at Edgeworthstown.