In the twentieth century William Butler Yeats acclaimed her as the first serious novelist from the upper class in Ireland; indeed, the Anglo-Irish tradition began with Edgeworth's
Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale (1800). Contemporary reviewers compared her novels with Miguel de Cervantes's
Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and Alain René Lesage's
Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715, 1724, 1735); Francis Jeffrey of the
Edinburgh Review wrote in July 1812 that "she has combined more solid instruction with more universal entertainment, and given more practical lessons of wisdom, with less tediousness and less pretension, than any other writer with whom we are acquainted." As a writer of didactic, realistic short fiction, Edgeworth was an ingenious inventor of tales written specifically for children, an audience unrecognized before writers such as Edgeworth and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Edgeworth was also one of the first authors to target audiences from the middle and lower classes.
Edgeworth was born at her mother's family home in Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, on 1 January 1768, the third child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Anna Maria Elers Edgeworth. The marriage was an intellectual mismatch and an unfortunate mistake; Maria spent her infancy at Black Bourton, where she remembered her mother crying while her father left them to join friends who shared his scientific and intellectual interests.
