Presents scholars, students and general readers with the major fiction for adults, much of the best of juvenile fiction, and a selection of the educational and occasional writings of Maria Edgeworth.

This twelve-volume edition of the major works of Maria Edgeworth makes available one of the most important but most neglected of women writers in English. Born in England in 1768 of an English mother and an Anglo-Irish father, Edgeworth lived from the age of fourteen on her father's estate in the Irish Midlands. She was introduced by her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, inventor, educationalist and Enlightenment polymath, to a remarkable range of books and current ideas. Her sparkling comedies of high-life English manners influenced Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. Her four remarkable Irish tales, beginning with Castle Rackrent (1800), initiate the national or regional novel, which feeds the nineteenth-century historical novel and the modern post-colonial novel. The fiction she wrote herself for and about children, which stayed in print for more than a century, remains among the very best of its kind. The educational treatises, handbooks and teaching materials she wrote in collaboration with R L Edgeworth are part of her period's breakthrough in understanding of the world of childhood.
This first collected edition since the nineteenth century makes available to scholars, students and general readers all the major fiction for adults, much of the best of juvenile fiction, and a generous selection of the educational and occasional writings of Maria Edgeworth. This edition restores to prominence Jane Austen's leading contemporary rival - a comic, original and often brilliant analyst of her world whose work John Ruskin declared, constituted 'the most re-readable books in existence'.

This seven-volume collection brings together the known works of Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century philosopher, writer and women’s rights advocate. Condemned by her contemporaries for her unconventional lifestyle, Wollstonecraft was later recognised as a founding figure of the feminist movement. She was also an acute observer of the political upheavals of the French revolution and advocated educational reform. Wollstonecraft’s writings, which include A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, are recognised as cornerstone texts in the development of feminist thought. This book is therefore a vital reference to the student of feminist history, and will also be of value to any reader interested in the origins of feminism.


The Works of Maria Edgeworth

by Marilyn Butler

Published 1 November 2003
This collected edition makes available all of Maria Edgeworth's major fiction for adults, much of her juvenile fiction, and also a selection of her educational and occasional writings. A dual pagination system indicates original page numbers for scholars.