Edgeworth, Maria - Teresa Michals (essay date 1994)
Teresa Michals (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "Commerce and Character in Maria Edgeworth," in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 49, No. 1, June, 1994, pp. 1-20.
[In the following essay, Michals examines "Edgeworth's idea of the relation between personality and property. "
In her time and in our own, Maria Edgeworth's reputation is oddly double. Read as a publicist for middle-class individualism, she is claimed for a progressive program; identified as a gifted apologist for paternalism, she is claimed for a conservative one. On one side of the question, critics like her biographer Marilyn Butler describe her as "the most thorough-going individualist writing outside the jacobin movement," while to others she is a committed paternalist to whom the very idea of "individual and inalienable rights" is deeply suspect. Contemporary reviewers present the same divided view, describing Edgeworth both as a dangerously secular utilitarian and as a...
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