Jane's Predecessor

You've heard of Jane Austen. But have you heard of Maria Edgeworth? The Second Pass illuminates you.

From the piece...

Maria Edgeworth might be the most important nineteenth-century novelist to have gotten lost in the twentieth. Like Fanny Burney before her and Mary Shelley after her, Maria was raised in the home of a famous father. Richard Lovell Edgeworth was an amateur scientist, a man of letters, and an “improving” landlord who returned from England to Ireland in 1782 with his thirteen-year-old prodigy of a daughter. Under his tutelage, at a tender age she was already conversant with the works of Adam Smith, but her literary education was also remarkable. She read widely and went on to write in many genres, sometimes in partnership with her father. In particular, she developed the new form of “national tale” in a series of novels about Ireland that inspired Walter Scott to try something similar for Scotland. The result was the Waverley novels. She was an innovator in domestic fiction as well, and her influence on Jane Austen is palpable.

Jane Austen remains pretty damn popular these days. The Morgan Library & Museum actually just started a new exhibition, "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy."