Castle Rackrent Essay - Maria Edgeworth

Handbook of British Romanticism (ed. Ralf Haekel), 2017

This article discusses Maria Edgeworth's first novel Castle Rackrent (1800) and focusses on the notion of instability, both on the plot level and the narrative structure of the text. Notions of degeneration and decay abound in the novel. Telling the story of the financial and moral ruin of an Anglo-Irish family and the ultimate loss of their their estate, Castle Rackrent has become the ur-text of the genre of the Anglo-Irish novel. What sets Castle Rackrent apart from other examples of the genre is its narrative structure. The main part of the text is narrated by Thady Quirk, an old, devoted and appropriately subjective servant. His obvious unreliability as a narrator is juxtaposed with a critical apparatus provided by a fictional editor. Instead of clarifying and structuring Thady's rambling account, however, the Editor also struggles in his role of scholarly commentator. Thus, neither discourse manages to provide a stable and reliable picture of pre-Union Ireland.

This article argues that Maria Edgeworth’s first three Irish Tales Castle Rackrent (1800), Ennui (1809), and The Absentee (1812) respond to Adam Smith’s writings on economic rent by constructing a new poetics premised on the unequal conditions of colonial ownership. This poetics presents literary representation not as an individual act of “making,” but rather through transactions of “rendering” between differently enfranchised makers and owners. After demonstrating the importance of Smith’s concept of rent to his theories of free trade and national development, I show how Edgeworth’s poetics of rent adopts the language of laissez-faire economics in order to re-sentimentalize damaged relations between Anglo-Irish landlords and their tenants. By following Smith in grounding national development in the economics of agricultural rent, the Irish Tales propose an alternative to the more familiar frameworks of liberal development put forward in the nineteenth century.

1997

The dual modes of realism and romance are frequently used as a convenient means of charting opposing tendencies in the history of the novel. At first glance, the work of Maria Edgeworth and of Lady Morgan would appear to illustrate these polarities. Where Edgeworth spearheads the use of naturalism and of social realism in her rational fictions about Ireland, Lady Morgan by contrast initiates and promotes a romantic and mythical view of the country and its history in her novels.' Edgeworth's highlighting of the intricacies of social interaction cede to a rival emphasis in the work of Lady Morgan on the alluring but threatening sublimity of the Irish landscape and of its inhabitants. On closer inspection, however, this neat dichotomy breaks down. This essay aims to trace the continuities and differences between two novels by these interrelated writers which were published in the aftermath of the Act of Union in 18oi.The texts which I shall examine are Maria Edgeworth's The...

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2002

New Hibernia Review, 2012

Routledge eBooks, 2017

Brontë Studies

European Romantic Review 23.5 (Oct 2012)

This article analyzes the episode from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) in which the spendthrift Sir Kit Rackrent abruptly marries “the grandest heiress in England” in order to repair his finances, only to imprison his new wife in her bedchamber when she won't relinquish her costly diamond jewelry to him. Thady, the elderly Irish narrator of the tale, appears to condone such abuse, perhaps because he is “shocked” and confounded by his master's bride, whom he describes alternatively as “a Jewish,” a “blackamoor,” and “a nabob.” I will argue that Thady's bewilderment over her racial, ethnic, and religious identities, linked with the “thousands of English pounds concealed in diamonds about her person,” associate Sir Kit's new wife with early colonial India given that “nabobs” and diamonds were commonly paired as the visible buyers and signs, respectively, of colonial rapacity during this era. Other references to diamonds in Edgeworth's works concretize their connection to exploitative colonial and sexual economies while helping to forge an associative link between British “nabobs” and European Jews by means of the Indian diamond trade. Diamonds in Castle Rackrent thus crystallize cultural anxieties regarding “commerce” – in all of the manifestations of that term – relating to both of these groups.