SOURCE: "Epilogue: A Literary Perspective," in Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1972, pp. 481-88.

In the following essay, Butler discusses Edgeworth as an innovator in the development of the novel of everyday life for a middle-class readership.

Whereas Jane Austen was so much the better novelist Maria Edgeworth may be the more important" P. H. Newby, Maria Edgeworth, 1950]. The critics who agree that this must be so have tended to focus their discussion on the merits and demerits of Castle Rackrent, parts of The Absentee, and even Belinda. If only Maria had asserted her independence of her father, she could have written about Lady Delacour without giving her a happy ending, or, better still, have continued in the native Irish idiom of Castle Rackrent. [These] traditional lamentations are, [dubious] and illogical. For if Maria had gone on in her earliest vein, or written according...