Castle Rackrent—Maria Edgeworth’s first novel, and the work for which she was and is best known—occupies a most unusual place in the history both of Irish literature and of English-language fiction. It has sometimes been called the first historical novel in English literature, yet in its tone it more closely resembles a comedy of manners than anything in the genre that has come to be known as “the historical novel.” It has been identified as the first of other lines as well—the first English novel written in a non-standard dialect, the first “provincial” or “regional” novel, and the first in what developed into the “big house” tradition of novels focused on the lives of the Anglo-Irish Protestant landholding class that dominated much of Ireland for centuries. Its innovative use of an unreliable narrator makes it also, arguably, an important milestone in the development of the novel form as a whole.
Castle Rackrent chronicles the declining fortunes and ultimate ruin of the Rackrent family through the mishandling of their estate by a series of incompetent and irresponsible heirs.
Edgeworth attested in a letter she wrote years later that “the only character drawn from the life” in the novel is Thady Quirk (servant to the Rackrent family, and the novel’s narrator). But the novel as a whole is grounded in real events—the careless landlords and the “middle men who grind the face of the poor” described in Edgeworth’s fiction were very real in eighteenth-century Ireland.
This edition does more than any other to set this classic novel in the political, economic, and religious context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish life; in addition to an illuminating introduction, the edition includes a variety of background historical materials.
Julie Nash is an associate professor in the English Department and Vice Provost of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, the editor of New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, and the author of Servants and Paternalism in the Works of Maria Edgeworth, as well as numerous other books and articles on Edgeworth and other nineteenth-century authors.
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