MARIA EDGEWORTH

MARIA EDGEWORTH (1766-1849), novelist, born at Blackbourton, Berks; from her fifteenth year her home was in Ireland; she declined the suit of a Swedish count, and remained till the close of her life unmarried; amongst the best known of her works are "Moral Tales," "Tales from Fashionable Life," "Castle Rackrent," "The Absentee," and "Ormond"; her novels are noted for their animated pictures of Irish life, and were acknowledged by Scott to have given him the first suggestion of the Waverley series; the Russian novelist, Turgenief, acknowledges a similar indebtedness; "in her Irish stories she gave," says Stopford Brooke, "the first impulse to the novel of national character, and in her other tales to the novel with a moral purpose".