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“... tracks its usage from Evelyn’s comments on English-language deficiencies to an 1809 novel by Maria Edgeworth, Ennui, or Memoirs of the Earl of Glenthorn, and then on to the name of a c.1914 painting by Walter Sickert, with interpretations of the word by Virginia Woolf and A.L. Hendriks. Scholar notes that Sickert chose his title as ‘an émigré ...”

“... of 1703. But Evelyn’s ‘naked and ashamed’ estate grew back to enchant a Regency visitor like Maria Edgeworth (‘Woods worthy of Sylvia indeed!’ she trilled), helped along by commercial good sense. In the 1730s, the tree nursery established by Sir John Evelyn Bt (Jack, the diarist’s grandson) supplied trees for some of the most elegant ...”

“... is not all. So there is a creak in a word such as ‘ensured’: ‘Her background ensured that Maria Edgeworth began her writing life in 1795 as an enlightened woman and a moderate feminist.’ Or there is the quiet obduracy as to what constitutes seriousness in a writer: ‘As far as the novel proper went, the loss of prestige that turns away serious ...”

“... novelists in the language. They tend to quote what Austen herself said of Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, that they conveyed in their novels ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties . . . in the best-chosen language’. Claire Harman’s book is subtitled ‘How Jane Austen Conquered the ...”

“... Ni Chonaill and Mary Barber in the 18th century to Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian, with Maria Edgeworth, excellently introduced by W.J. MacCormack, the only woman to whom a whole section is devoted. This is by no means a lamentable showing, and the editors might argue that given the state of feminist history in Ireland in the late ...”

“... Vernon Lee’ pronounced Sterne to be more rewarding than Fielding (largely on moral grounds), Maria Edgeworth to write more enjoyably than Jane Austen, Villette to be superior to Jane Eyre, and a certain Mrs Jenkin to be a finer writer by far, in the realistic mode, than George Eliot. (Mrs Jenkin was a close friend of the Ruffinis.) At 15, Vernon Lee ...”

“... writings, and especially the Reflections, to the body of Anglo-Irish fiction which began with Maria Edgeworth. (In this essay, he sensibly remarks that, ‘though there are difficulties attaching to the term “Anglo-Irish literature”, it is too late to purge it from our critical vocabulary’ – an attitude one wishes he’d displayed more often ...”

“... a conventional, even obsessional topos in 18th-century women’s writing; one sees it in novels by Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, Sophia Lee, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Inchbald and numerous others. It is frequently amalgamated with a sort of Bluebeard motif: in Inchbald’s A Simple Story the heroine is kept prisoner by her father, whom she has ...”

“... at 30. He had four adoring and talented sisters, and innumerable sympathetic friends, including Maria Edgeworth and William Wordsworth. His scientific star never publicly waned: just before his death, in 1865, he was being honoured as one of the world’s greatest scientists. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica he merits a longer column than either of ...”

“... lives’. But is the matter remedied by calling Ellis Cornelia Knight ‘Cornelius’? Or Helen Maria Williams ‘Helena’? Or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ‘Montague’? Or Cecilia ‘Cecelia’? Or Anne Ehrenpreis ‘Ehrenpries’? Or Patricia Köster ‘Koster’? Or Margarette Smith ‘Margaret’? Or Antonia Fraser ‘Frazer’? Above all, what credence ...”

“... ascendancy in France, he was widely known to be (in the words of his father-in-law, Richard Edgeworth) a ‘little fat democrat’, utterly hostile to the corrupt, repressive and belligerent government of Pitt, which enjoyed, however, huge support among those with the longest purses. And perhaps, for all his hyperbolic puffing of the therapeutic ...”

“... as in the magnum opus edition of the Waverley Novels – was coming into vogue, and writers like Maria Edgeworth were having their tales reprinted in monthly volumes. Hogg coveted the distinction of a Collected Prose and he worked hard to get it. When Blackwood first agreed and then hesitated, Hogg looked elsewhere. A London publisher, James ...”

“... books should be printed on good paper with large well-spaced print. For the same readership, Maria Edgeworth published stories, Evenings at Home and The Parent’s Assistant (a title she disliked but which Johnson thought more likely to sell). Sarah Trimmer, the mother of ten surviving children, pioneered illustrated books, using a family of robins ...”

“... William Blake (as an illustrator), S.T. Coleridge, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, Maria Edgeworth, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Charlotte Smith, John Horne Tooke, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft and William ...”

“... life’; but there is frequently something pressing in on them that is private and reserved. As Maria Edgeworth shrewdly noted, Barbauld ‘always does more than she says’. Edgeworth admired her but grew fed up, despite the continuing chattiness of her letters, privately referring with vivid irritation to ...”