Edgeworth was a member of the "Lunar Group" of scientists, including Joseph Priestley, zoologist Erasmus Darwin, and theorist Thomas Day. Her mother died in 1773, when Maria was five years old, of puerperal fever, ten days after giving birth to her fifth child.
Four months after Edgeworth's mother's death, her father married Honora Sneyd, a friend of the poet Anna Seward from Lichfield. Her father was a powerful, personable character, and his new wife had high standards for raising children. Their deep passion for one another had been ignited long before her mother's death, and their love must have seemed an insurmountable barrier to the attention Maria desperately needed when her father took his new wife, along with his children from the former marriage, to their new home in England. Grieving deeply for her mother, Maria became a problem child in the eyes of her new stepmother, who neglected to see her as anything but naughty. Her father began to realize mistakes he had made by his own past negligence, but the problems of a small child were insignificant in his egocentric world.
Troublesome incidents began to occur as Maria tried to express her anger and grief by trampling on hotbed frames to break the glass and cutting out the squares of her aunt's checked sofa pillows.
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