As the reader realises the power of Maria Edgeworth's mind, her ability to describe manners and customs, to read character, and to depict comic and tragic scenes, he wishes that her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, had not so constantly interfered in her work, and insisted that every book she wrote must illustrate some principle of education. He was not singular in this respect. Rousseau, whom he greatly admired at one time, had taught educational methods by a novel. Madame de Genlis, the teacher of Louis Philippe, was writing novels that were celebrated throughout Europe, in which she expounded rules for the training of the young. Maria Edgeworth, with her father at her elbow, never lost sight of the moral of her tale. Vivian, in the story of that name, was so weak that he was always at the mercy of the artful. Ormond's passions led him into trouble. Beauclerc was almost ruined by his foolish generosity. Lady Delacour, with no object in life but pleasure, cast aside her own happiness that she might outshine the woman she hated. Lady Clonbrony squandered her fortune and health that she might be snubbed by her social superiors. Mrs. Beaumont played a deep diplomatic game in her small circle of friends, and finally overreached herself. Lady Cecilia, the friend of Helen, brought sorrow to her and infamy upon herself by her duplicity. In the analysis of motive, and the growth of Cecilia's wrong-doing from a small beginning, the book resembles the novels of George Eliot. But Maria Edgeworth could not know her own characters as she otherwise would, because the moral was always uppermost. When Mrs. Inchbald criticised her novel Patronage, she replied: "Please to recollect, we had our moral to work out." Mr. Edgeworth, in his preface to Tales of Fashionable Life, thus sets forth his daughter's purpose:
"It has been my daughter's aim to promote by all her works the progress of education from the cradle to the grave. All the parts of this series of moral fiction bear upon the faults and excellencies of different ages and classes; and they have all risen from that view of society which we have laid before the public in more didactic works on education."
Such a method of writing tended to kill emotion, yet emotion breaks out at times with genuine force, and always has a true ring. This is especially true in the Tales of Fashionable Life. There society women appear cold and heartless in the drawing-room, and so they have generally been represented in fiction. So Thackeray regarded them. But Maria Edgeworth followed them to the boudoir, and there reveals beneath the laces and jewels many beautiful womanly traits. As we see in tale after tale true feeling welling to the surface, and then choked up by the moral, we recognise the pathetic truth that Mr. Edgeworth's educational methods were fatal to genius.
But strong emotion sways only a small part of the lives of most men and women. Were it otherwise, like the great lyric poets, we should all die young. And she has written about the common, everyday, prosaic life with a truthfulness rarely excelled.
One of the most interesting studies in a novel is to observe the author's view of life. With the exception of those of Mademoiselle De Scudéri nearly all the novels of French women considered love as the ruling passion for happiness or woe, and all of the characters were under its sway. Even Mademoiselle De Scudéri in the preface to Ibrahim announced it as her distinct purpose that all her heroes were to be ruled by the two most sublime passions, love and ambition; but she was a humorist and unconsciously interested her readers more by her witty descriptions of people than by the loves of Cyrus and Mandane. But this passion has seldom held such an exaggerated place in the stories of English women. Maria Edgeworth in particular noticed that men and women were actuated by many motives or passions. A large income or a title was often capable of inspiring a feeling so akin to love that even the bosom that felt its glow was unable to distinguish the difference. Loss of respect could kill the strongest passion, and some of her heroines have even remained single, or else married men whom at first they had regarded with indifference, rather than marry the object of their first love after he had forfeited their esteem. Sometimes the tameness of her heroines shocked their author. While correcting Belinda for Mrs. Barbauld's "Novelists' Library," Miss Edgeworth wrote to a friend:
"I really was so provoked with the cold tameness of that stick or stone Belinda, that I could have torn the pages out."
Propinquity, opportunity, almost a mental suggestion are quite enough to produce a long chain of events affecting a lifetime. "Ask half the men you are acquainted with why they are married, and their answer, if they speak the truth, will be, 'Because I met Miss Such-a-One at such a place, and we were continually together.' 'Propinquity, propinquity,' as my father used to say, and he was married five times, and twice to heiresses." So speaks Mrs. Broadhurst, a match-making mother in The Absentee. And this is the reason why most of Miss Edgeworth's heroes and heroines love. But the advances of a designing woman are quite sufficient, as in Vivian, to make a fond lover forget his plighted troth to another, and the flattery of an unscrupulous man makes him suspicious of his real friends. Character is destiny, if the character is strong, but circumstances are destiny, if the character is weak. It is the aim of her novels to show how certain traits of character, as indecision, pride, love of luxury, indolence, lead to misfortune, and how these dangerous traits may be overcome.
Notwithstanding her moral, her plots are never hackneyed and never repeated. They are drawn from life and have the variety of life. In the story of Ennui, there is the twice-told tale of the nurse's son substituted for the real heir; but when he learns the true story of his birth, and resigns the castle, the title, and all its wealth to the rightful Earl of Glenthorn, who has been living in the village working at the forge, there is a great change from the usual story. The heir of the ancient family of Glenthorn accepts the earldom for his son, but with reluctance. The manners of the peasant remain with the earl, and the poor man, at last, begs the one who has been educated for the position to accept the title and the estates. In this she emphasised again what she constantly taught, that education and environment are more powerful than heredity.
As she taught that reason should be the guide of life, so she lived. Her fourscore years and three were spent largely at her ancestral home of Edgeworthstown. She assisted her father in making improvements to better the condition of the tenantry, and to promote their happiness. When in Paris, she met a Mr. Edelcrantz, a gentleman in the service of the king of Sweden. Admiration was succeeded by love. But he could not leave the court at Stockholm, and Miss Edgeworth felt that neither duty nor inclination would permit her to leave her quiet life in Ireland. Reason was stronger than love. So they parted like her own heroes and heroines. All that history records of him is that he never married. She resumed her responsibilities at home, and if the thought of this separation sometimes brought the tears to her eyes, as her stepmother once wrote to a friend, she was as cheerful, gay, and light-hearted in the home circle as she had always been.