Maria Edgeworth - Maria Edgeworths Letters from Ireland

MARIA

EDGEWORTH S

LETTERS

FROM

IRELAND

SELECTED & EDITED BY

VALERIE PAKENHAM

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

MMXVIII

Dedication

To my sister, Linda.

Introduction

I first came across Maria Edgeworth more than fifty years ago. The Pakenham family into which I had just married were the Edgeworths neighbours and also relations. Marias grandfather had been brought up by Thomas Pakenham, the first Lord Longford, after his parents died and her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth had been a close friend of the next two generations. In his Memoirs he claimed to have been cured as a wild young man of a passion for field sports and card playing by being given the key to the library at Pakenham Hall and encouraged to serious reading. The second volume (partly written by Maria) described the familys frequent journeys from Edgeworthstown to Castlepollard, seventeen miles away, across a vast Serbonian bog with a perilous crossing of raft or float across the River Inny en route.

I did not know much about Maria herself but several friends had already pressed on me copies of Castle Rackrent (perhaps as a warning!). And in a bedroom I discovered a charming illustrated set of her novels, reissued in 1832, and read my way through the ones set in Ireland, Ormond , Ennui and The Absentee . Then in the library I found a modest clothbound three-volume Memoir of Maria Edgeworth by her stepmother, Mrs Frances Edgeworth. Privately printed in 1867, it was made up largely of Marias letters to her family. To my delight, they included detailed descriptions of our house in the early 1800s, when the 2 nd Earl of Longford was busy transforming it inside and out to a Gothic Revival castle, complete with a hot air central-heating system designed by Marias father. Maria seemed to have had rather a tendresse for dear hospitable Lord Longford, and did not like his English wife when he finally married aged forty in 1816.

In the 1970s my interest in Maria Edgeworth received another boost. We were given two magnificent volumes, Maria Edgeworths Letters from England, 18131842 and Maria Edgeworth in France and Switzerland , edited by Christina Colvin, a direct descendant of Marias youngest half-brother, Michael Pakenham Edgeworth; and a brilliant new literary biography of Maria Edgeworth by Marilyn Butler, married to Christina Colvins brother, David. Both had drawn on the private Edgeworth family papers, which Christina Colvin had only recently catalogued in full. Then, twenty-five years later again, my daughter Eliza embarked on a composite biography of the Pakenhams of Marias generation. It involved her reading through many of Marias original letters, now accessible in the National Library of Ireland, and in the New Bodleian library in Oxford. Reading Elizas notes reminded me just what a delightful letter writer Maria was, full of stories and wild humour and affection and also of how many of her letters remained still unpublished and unknown. Partly this was because of Marias own strong disapproval of the publication of private letters. How could she write naturally with any ease or pleasure with one eye squinting at the public and celebrity and the other pretending to look only to my dear friend or correspondent. Even Augustus Hare, who published The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth in 1894, had not been granted access to Marias original letters but simply shortened and re-printed those from the Memoir of 1867, which, as Christina Colvin pointed out in the preface to her own books, had already been heavily cut and sanitized from the originals by Marias younger sisters so as not to offend the living or their descendants

Nearly 170 years after Marias death, there seemed to me an overwhelming case for a book of Marias unbowdlerized letters from Ireland if only to redress the balance of Christina Colvins two large volumes of Marias letters from abroad. Christina Colvin had dismissed Marias letters from home as largely of domestic interest only. But Maria had always proclaimed herself as above all a domestic being, happiest living at home among her beloved family. Ireland was the country she knew and loved and where she lived for nearly all her adult life, and Edgeworthstown, away from the social whirl of London, Paris or Dublin, was the place where, she wrote, she could best find time to write and think.

How to go about it? From the beginning it was clear that, as in the original Memoir , many of her letters could be printed in part only. Some of them run to thirty pages of close writing, punctuated largely by dashes. (Like her contemporaries, Maria preferred the dash to the comma or full stop.) During his lifetime her father was constantly reproving her for writing long letters instead of directing her energies to useful work for publication. And even when not engaged on composing stories for children or novels (or Moral Tales as she preferred to call them), Maria was expected to act as his secretary and bookkeeper for estate business. However he grudgingly acknowledged Marias letters were excellent and came to rely on her to relay the family news. After his death in 1817, released from discipline as his literary partner, she wrote if anything twice as many letters. Exchanging news and ideas was essential to her being. As she wrote to her aunt in 1830, I really think if my thoughts or feelings were shut up completely within me, I should burst in a week like a steam engine without a snifting-clack

Sending letters was expensive Marias later letters are full of grateful references to those who could provide her with free franks: officials, peers and MP s (one favourite much-exploited provider was the Earl of Rosse who served as Irish postmaster general from 1809 to 1831). Letters were paid by weight so it was often important to cram as much as possible onto each page. Mercifully for later readers, Maria seldom went in for the dreadful practice of overwriting at right angles to the original lines to save money, and her handwriting is nearly always legible.

Nearly all the letters I have chosen are to her immediate family, to whom she wrote most freely in a delightful conversational style. When she wrote to those outside it, she usually became more prolix and sometimes, when writing to men, rather heavily flirtatious. Her family was very large. Richard Lovell Edgeworth had provided Maria with three stepmothers in turn and twenty-one mostly much younger siblings. (Some of Marias biographers have treated him as a kind of Irish Bluebeard but he appears to have become an affectionate husband except in his first marriage to Marias unfortunate mother, which he described in his all-too-candid Memoirs as a folly he had brought upon himself.) There were also several aunts and cousins: Marias favourite correspondent was her fathers younger sister, Margaret Ruxton, a sprightly, clever and highly sociable lady who had been one of the first to show Maria affection as a child. (It was she who encouraged Marias stories and imitations of John Langan, the Edgeworths steward, who was the original for Honest Thady in Castle Rackrent. ) Aunt Ruxton lived about forty miles away outside Navan in Co. Meath in a delightful cottage orn beside the Boyne, and there was much coming and going between there and Edgeworthstown. There were three Ruxton daughters and the middle one, Sophy, became Marias particular friend. Maria used her as a sounding board for most of her novels and childrens stories, and also as confidante in matters of the heart. (Maria was plain or believed herself so and seems to have had only one serious suitor, a Swedish diplomat, the Chevalier Edelcrantz whom she met in Paris in 1802. She turned him down, unable to bear the thought of leaving her father and living abroad, but she remained obsessed with him for many years after and painted an idealized version of him in one of her longest novels, Patronage. )