Like Fanny Burney, she owed much to the enthusiasm and example of a liberal-minded and cultured father: that Richard Lovell Edgeworth who married several of the young persons whom the author of Sandford and Merton had educated for the honour of his own hand. He and Day were notable scholastic reformers, and the influence of their innumerable theories on life and the Pedagogue, largely imported from over the Channel, is everywhere visible in Maria’s work.
Richard Lovell actually collaborated in the two volumes, inspired by Rousseau’s Émile, on Practical Education (1798), and supplied forewords of edification to that marvellous series in which she first proved the possibility of training the young idea by ethical storiettes which were not tracts. That most clumsily named Parents’ Assistant (1801), the Moral Tales of the same year, and the fascinating Frank, are still nursery classics deserving of immortality. We may not, to-day, accept without protest many of the “lessons” which they were designed to enforce; but their sympathetic insight into the nature of the child (with which recently we have been so much concerned), the attractive simplicity and dramatic interest of the direct narrative, set an example, from the very foundations of juvenile literature, which has borne plentiful fruit.
It should be noticed, moreover, in this connection that Miss Edgeworth had already produced a spirited defence of female education (Letters to Literary Ladies, 1795); while she soon followed in the footsteps of Fanny Burney by writing most lively satires on fin de siècle Society, pointed with travesties of French “naturalism,” of which the chief, perhaps, is Belinda, published in 1801; and further extended the scope of the modern novel by the introduction of the finished Short Story, under the attractive heading of Tales of Fashionable Life.
And, finally, besides again collaborating with her father in an Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), she produced that stimulating “Irish Brigade,” which banished the “stage” Patrick from literature, introduced genuine Celtic types, such as Coney, King of the Black Isles; and, by creating the “national” novel, may be regarded as the legitimate parent of what their illustrious author so modestly offered to the public as “something of the same kind for his own country.”
Although just failing everywhere to reveal genius, Miss Edgeworth reflects, with marvellous versatility, all the intellectual movements of her generation. Adopting, and adapting to her own purposes, the “form for women” set out by Miss Burney, she widened its application to the discussion of social and political problems, and was the first to make fiction a picture not only of life, but of its meaning. In fact she forestalled no less for adults, than for the young, that vast array of consciously didactic narrative which threatens, in our own time, to bury beyond revival the original, and the supreme, inspiration of Art in Literature—to give pleasure.
The humour, the pathos, the knowledge of the world, and, above all, the common sense regulating Miss Edgeworth’s work, have not secured her as permanent a popularity as she justly merits. But, if we do not, to-day, frequently read even Ormond, The Absentee, or Castle Rackrent, the occasions which gratefully recall their accomplished author to our remembrance are most astonishingly frequent.
Of Hannah More (1745-1833) most readers probably know even far less than of Maria Edgeworth; and her work can only claim notice in this place on account of the energy with which she followed Miss Edgeworth’s lead in didactic fiction. Accustomed to the society of fashionable blue-stockings (then a comparative novelty in London life), she exposed their foibles with considerable humour in private correspondence; while her plays were cheerfully staged by Garrick. But awakened, in later life, to the sin of play-going, she became known for her vigorous tracts (inspiring, by turns, the foundation of Sunday schools and of the Religious Tract Society), until she published, at sixty-four, her one novel entitled Cœlebs in Search of a Wife.
If this somewhat ponderous effusion does not altogether deserve the satirical onslaught with which Sydney Smith heralded in the Edinburgh its first appearance, we cannot claim for the author any particular skill in construction or much fidelity to real life. It is, in fact, no more than a “dramatic sermon,” and a sermon, moreover, in support of narrow-minded sectarianism. As the reviewer informs us, “Cœlebs wants a wife ... who may add materially to the happiness of his future life. His first journey is to London, where, in the midst of the gay society of the metropolis, of course, he does not find a wife; and his next journey is to the family of Mr. Stanley, the head of the Methodists, a serious people, where, of course, he does find a wife.” That is the whole story. We must submit, in the meantime, to diatribes, pronounced by the virtuous, against dancing, theatres, cards, assemblies, and frivolous conversation, until we are in danger of losing all interest in the persons of the tale.
It is enough for us, in fact, to mark a niche for Miss More in the development of women’s work; only remembering the great service she rendered her generation by a rarely sympathetic understanding of the poor as individual human beings.