"Whatever her Faith may be": Some Notes on Catholicism in Maria Edgeworth's Oeuvre
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20138829Keywords:
Maria Edgeworth, Catholicism, Ireland, Colonialism, Women-authored literatureAbstract
The relationship between the Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth (1768- 1849) and Catholicism has always been close and conditioned by the authoress’s inscription in the Protestant Ascendancy ancatholod by her father’s enlightened ideas. The intention of the present study is to reevaluate the role of Roman Catholics in the fictional and non-fictional texts some of which Edgeworth wrote alone and others in collaboration with her father. The Edgeworths were more interested in individual worth than in sectarianism and promoted the economic and intellectual advancement of Ireland, a process in which Catholics not only played an important part but also appeared in a quite favourable light. The defence and acceptance of Catholics is articulated in Edgeworth’s works around the insistence on the education of the Irish Catholics and the depiction of the legitimisation of the Anglo-Irish landlord and his marriage to a woman of Catholic ancestry. It will be shown that, rather than embrace the position of a colonist, Edgeworth bravely attacked prejudice and abuses of power on the part of the English against the Irish and at the same time she foresaw a society where Roman Catholics would retain their identity and would also occupy the same social level as the rest of the British.Downloads
References
Beckett, J.C. 1976. The Anglo-Irish Tradition. Ithaca, New York: Cornell U.P.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Butler, Harriet Jesse and Harold Edgeworth Butler. 1928. “Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth: Some Unpublished Letters”. Modern Language Review 23 (3): 273-98.
Butler, Marilyn. 1972. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
—. 1981. Romantics, Rebels and Revolutionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760-1830. Oxford, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Oxford U.P.
—. 1992. Introduction. Castle Rackrent and Ennui (1800-1809). Harmonsworth: Penguin Classics: 1-54.
—. (Gen. ed.) 1999 and 2003. The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth. 13 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto.
—. 2001. “Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture and Secret Codes”. Novel 34 (2): 267-292.
—. 2004. “Edgeworth, the United Irishmen, and ‘More Intelligent Treason’”. In Kauffman, Heidi and Chris Fauske (eds.) An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and her Contexts. Newark: University of Delaware Press: 33-61.
Carderera, Mariano. 1855. Diccionario de educación y métodos de enseñanza. Tomo 2. Madrid: Imprenta de A. Vicente.
Colvin, Christina (ed.) 1971. Letters from England 1813-1844. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Corbett, Mary Jean. 1994a. “Public Affections and Familiar Politics: Burke, Edgeworth and the ‘Common Naturalisation’ of Great Britain”. English Literary History 61: 877-897.
—. 1994b. “Another Tale to Tell: Postcolonial Theory and the Case of Castle Rackrent”. Criticism 36 (3): 383-400.
—. 2002. “Between History and Fiction: Plotting Rebellion in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui”. Nineteenth-Century Literature 57 (3): 297-322.
Dab undo, Laura. 2006. “Maria Edgeworth and the Irish ‘Thin Places’”. In Nash, Julie (ed.): 193-198.
Dunne, Tom. 1991. “‘A Gentleman’s Estate Should Be a Moral School’: Edgeworthstown in Fact and Fiction, 1760-1840”. In Gillespie,
Raymond and Gerard Moran (eds.) Longford: Essays in County History. Dublin: The Lilliput Press: 95-112.
Eagleton, Terry. 1995. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. London and New York: Verso.
Edgeworth, Maria. 1817. Comic Dramas, in Three Acts. London: R. Hunter.
—. 1848. Orlandino. Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers.
—. 1893. Harrington, Tales and Novels by Maria Edgeworth. The Longford Edition. Vol. 9. London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd.
—. (1893) 1967. Tales and Novels. The Longford Edition. Vol. 4. Rpt. Anglistica and Americana Series. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.
—. 1972. Ormond. Jeffares, Norman A. (ed. and introd.) Shannon, Ireland: Irish U.P.
—. 1988. The Absentee. McCormack, W.J. and Kim Walker (eds. and introd.) Oxford and New York: Oxford U.P.
—. (1809) 1994a. Essays on Professional Education. With R. L. Edgeworth. Bristol: Thoemnes Press; Taipei: Unifacmanu Trading Company Ltd.
—. (1801) 1994b. Belinda. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn J. (ed. and introd.) Oxford and New York: Oxford U.P.
—. (1801-12) 1994c. Castle Rackrent and The Absentee. Hertfordshire: Wordworth Classics.
—. (1800) 1995. Castle Rackrent. Watson, G. (ed. and introd.) Oxford and New York: Oxford U.P.
Felsenstein, Frank. 1995. Anti-semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture 1660-1830. Baltimore and London: the Johns Hopkins U.P.
Fernández Rodríguez, Carmen María. 2008. “From Ireland to Australia: Gendered Illustrations of the Nation in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui and Rosa Praed’s Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land”. In Lorenzo Modia, María Jesús and Roy C. Boland Osegueda (eds.) Australia and Galicia: Defeating the Tyranny of Distance. Jannali: Antipodas Monographs: 309-319.
—. 2009. “Leaving Utopia Behind: Maria Edgeworth’s Views of America”. Estudios Irlandeses 4: 9-20.
—. 2010a. “Blurring the Lines between the Nations: Slippery Identities in Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage (1814) and Ormond (1817)”. Op. Cit: A Journal of Anglo-American Studies 12: 277-288.
—. 2010b. “Traducción y didactismo en el siglo diecinueve: ‘Mañana’ y ‘Un acreedor’ de Maria Edgeworth”. Babel 19: 21-38.
—. 2012. “Slight Productions: An Introduction to Maria Edgeworth’s Comic Dramas (1817)”. Estudios Irlandeses 7: 33-43.
Giffin, Michael. 2002. Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. 1984. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale U.P.
Grey, Rowland. 1907. “Society According to Maria Edgeworth”. Fortnightly Review 82: 296-308.
Häusermann, W.C. 1952. The Genevese Background. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Jeffrey, Francis. 1817. “Review of Harrington and Ormond”. The Edinburgh Review 28: 390-412.
Kauffman, Heidi and Chris Fauske (eds.) 2004. An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and her Contexts. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Kelly, Gary. 1992. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft. Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd.
Kim, Elizabeth S. 2003. “Maria Edgeworth’s The Grateful Negro: A Site for Rewriting Rebellion”. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16 (1): 103-126.
Knox-Shaw, Peter. 2004. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.
Mac Donald, Edgar E. (ed.) 1977. The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Rachel Lazarus Mordecai and Maria Edgeworth. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Manly, Susan. 2000. “Burke, Toland, Toleration: the Politics of Prejudice, Speculation and Naturalization”. In Whale, John (ed.) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Manchester and New York: Manchester U.P.: 145-167.
—. 2006. “Maria Edgeworth (1768-1846)”. The Female Spectator 10 (2): 1-3.
McCormack, W.J. 1985. Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
McLoughlin, Tim. 2002. “Settler Instability: Edgeworth’s Irish Novels and Settler Writing from Zimbabwe”. In Hooper, Glen and Colin Graham (eds.) Irish and Postcolonial Writings. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 89-108.
Moynahan, Julian. 1995. “Maria Edgeworth 1768-1845: Origination and A Checklist”. In Moynahan, Julia (ed.) Anglo-Irish: The
Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton: Princeton U.P.: 12-42.
Murray, Patrick. 1971. Maria Edgeworth: A Study of The Novelist. Cork: The Mercier Press.
Myers, Mitzi. 1995. “Shot from Cannons; Or, Maria Edgeworth and the Cultural Production and Consumption of the Late Eighteenth-
Century Woman Writer”. In Bermingham, Ann and John Brewer (eds.) The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text. New York: Routledge: 193-214.
—. 1996. “‘Like the Pictures in a Magic Lantern’: Gender, History, and Edgeworth’s Rebellion Narratives”. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19: 373-412
Nash, Julie. 2006. New Essays on Maria Edgeworth. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan. 1985. “Women as Writers: Dánta Grá to Maria Edgeworth”. In Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan. (ed.) Irish Women, Image and Achievement. Dublin: Arlen House: 111-126.
O’Shaughnessy, D. 1999. “Ambivalence in Castle Rackrent”. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 25 (1-2): 427-440.
Rees, Abraham. 1819. The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature. 39 vols. London: Longman, Hurst,
Rees, Orme and Brown.
“Review of Helen”. 1834. North American Review 39: 167-200.
“Review of Tales of Fashionable Life”. Second Series. 1812. Eclectic Review 8: 979-1000.
Ryan, Kara M. 2006. “Justice, Citizenship and the Question of Feminine Subjectivity: Reading The Absentee as a Historical Novel”. In Nash, J. (ed.): 175-192.
Tracy, Robert. 1985. “Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality versus Legitimacy”. Nineteenth Century Fiction 40 (1): 1-22.
Wolff, Robert Lee. 1978. “Introduction”. Ennui. New York: Garland: v-xxv.
Woolf, Virginia. 1942. The Common Reader. London: The Hogarth Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
