I recently read another 19th century novel in my life-long, completely unreasonable, endeavor to read all the novels of the first half of the century. There is something interesting, I suppose, about having an unattainable goal. This novel was The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth. The Absentee was written in the first decade of the 1800s and was first published in Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life in 1809. Though she is little known today outside of those with a particular interest in 19th century literature, Edgeworth wrote around 15 novels throughout her career, as well as interesting educational and political works.
Maria Edgeworth was a remarkable
woman from a remarkable family. Maria’s father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was a
brilliant inventor who worked with some of the great scientific minds of the
era including James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. Maria was sister in law to the
famous physician Dr. Thomas Beddoes, and her brothers included engineer William
Edgeworth and Michael Pakenham Edgeworth the botanist. One of her nephews
became a well-known economist, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, and one of her nieces
married the astronomer Thomas Romney Robinson. All in all, not bad family
credentials.
One of the difficulties in
reading or studying Maria Edgeworth’s work is the fact that her father was
actively involved in most of her literary efforts and it is therefore difficult
to tell where his work ends and hers begins. And since this authorial problem
is more or less intractable, as far as I can tell, when you look at Maria’s
entire oeuvre you have to assume to some degree that many of the ideas
expressed there are joint efforts.
Edgeworth was, arguably, the most
successful woman writer in England up until that time, and her works are
indicative of the transition from pre-modern to modern novels. Though she wrote
a number of stories before the 19th century began, her first novel
was published in the year 1800 and she is therefore, in a sense, the first
important British woman novelist of the century. When you read Edgeworth’s
works you can distinctly see the modern novel evolving. Maria’s predecessors in
Briton, like Oliver Goldsmith, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe, for example,
were inheritors of traditional story-telling, and as such their novels are
often narratives – that is to say a story distinctly told by a narrator. Large
parts of most early novels are told directly through narration; the writer
describes events and actions, sometimes over long periods, and then breaks in
with dramatic scenes. Through the efforts of novelists like Fanny Burney and
Samuel Richardson, this tradition began to change and dramatic scenes began to
play a bigger role. Over time, more of the novel’s actions were understood
through the interactions between the characters. One of the problems with
novels that were predominantly narration is the tendency for them to become
didactic or moral tales. On the other hand, dramatic novels allow the reader to
decide for herself what the characters are thinking or what actions might be
good or bad. Now, Maria Edgeworth’s novel exist squarely between these two
traditions, she used dramatic scenes very effectively but still fell back on
and relied on narration a great deal. It was in the generation after Edgeworth,
with writers like Jane Austin, that we really see the full formation of the
modern novel.
Edgeworth’s novel The Absentee is an excellent example of
this problem. The dramatic scenes are very effective and quite modern, but
Edgeworth regresses into narration for long periods of the story’s action and
during these periods she overstates the clear political motivation of her
story.
The Absentee is essentially about a family of the Irish landed
gentry that has left their homeland to take up fashionable residence in the
English capital. As absentee landlords they have put their estates in the hands
of an unscrupulous agent whose greed has left the estates and their tenants in
decline and poverty. As a result of being so distant from the source of their
income, the family has become unaware of how neglected their properties have
become, and they have overspent, and gone heavily into debt. Through the
efforts of their son who is also inheriting a large estate and title, they see
the error of their ways and eventually return to their lands and commit once
again to be responsible landlords working in the interest of their own
property, the lives of their tenants, as well as for the nation of Ireland. Through
this moral/political tale Edgeworth weaves a love story between the son and a
cousin, and the story climaxes in typical 19th century fashion when
it is discovered that the cousin is not, in fact, a blood relation and is heir
to her own great fortune, thus leaving the path free for the lovers to wed.
The historical ground of this story
was a subject with which Edgeworth had personal knowledge. Maria was born in
England and for the first sixteen years of her life, her father was an absentee
landlord from their family estates in Edgeworthtown in County Longford. Around
the time that Maria finished with her formal education, her father took his
large family back to Ireland and, with the help of Maria, who was a very
capable and resourceful young woman, he returned the estates to prosperity,
improving the estate-house, reclaiming marsh land with the aid his own moveable
railroad (one of the very first functioning railways ever built), and returning
the arable land to appropriate usage. Besides being an ingenious inventor,
Richard Edgeworth was also a very liberally minded man who, for the era in
which he lived, went to great lengths to improve the lives of his tenants,
improving their homes and supporting the education of their children. Richard
Edgeworth was also an avid supporter of religious freedom, gaining a great deal
of loyalty from his various catholic tenants who were still suffering under the
yolk of English prosecution. And though it was still be over a hundred years
until Ireland gained its independence from England, Edgeworth took an active
part in the first steps toward the struggle for Irish freedom.
Again, it is unclear the extent
to which the political/social message of Maria Edgeworth’s novel was the result
of her own work or the result of her father’s support and, some might say,
interference in the literary process. Either way, at times The Absentee is sometimes heavy-handed with overt statements about
the evils of absenteeism, such as when Lord Colambre, the liberal and
inquisitive son of the story, observes upon his visit to the family estates
“what I have just seen is the picture only of that to which an Irish estate and
Irish tenantry may be degraded in the absence of those whose duty and interest
it is to reside in Ireland, to uphold justice by example and authority; but
who, neglecting this duty, commit power to bad hands and bad hearts – abandon
their tenantry to oppression and their property to ruin.”
This didacticism by no means
ruined the novel for me, and when I read Maria Edgeworth I am continually
amazed that while Jane Austin is nearly a household name, the name Edgeworth
languishes even among highly literate, novel-reading people. It is, in part,
the political messaging of Edgeworth’s novels that has subjected them to
relative obscurity. Besides the fact that modern readers have, across the
board, eschewed any form of overt didacticism in ‘literature,’ they are not
generally fond of too much political messaging in the books they read. It is by
no means surprising that writers like Austin and the Bronte sisters continue to
be so popular while writers like Edgeworth, Gaskell, Martineau, Eliot, and
others languish. Even with the contemporary feminist effort to reestablish the
work and reputations of women writers, the vast majority of readers continue to
gravitate toward writers who are overtly romantic and commercial in the most
tedious sense that those words convey. However, though Edgeworth’s novels are
not as ‘modern-sounding’ as Austin’s, they are expertly written, intensely
interesting, and not without their own Romantic charm.
