Maria Edgeworth was the best-known novelist in Britain from 1800 until the publication of Walter Scott's Waverley in 1814. She was also one of the most important writers of fiction for children in the nineteenth century. She developed the late-eighteenth-century novel of manners and sentiment, as practiced by Frances Burney and other women writers, into a vehicle for representing a national difference-in-unity in the aftermath of a revolutionary crisis that had threatened to break society and the nation apart during the 1790s. She infused the late-eighteenth-century didactic and instructional tale for children, practiced by the sisters Mary Ann and Dorothy Kilner, Sarah Trimmer, and other women writers, with a new complexity, domestic realism, and liveliness, instrumental in founding the main tradition of nineteenth-century children's literature and still influential today. These two spheres of fiction writing were not separate but interdependent. Both were dedicated to constructing the individual as a moral and rational self, independent of merely relative social categories of worth and identity and thus able to construct families and local communities based on relationships of affection rather than social interest and power.
