Sophie Gee

She spends her early teenage years in England.

She goes to a school in London, actually.

Her father, Mr Edgeworth, has this estate in Edgeworthton in London.

in Ireland and when Maria is about 14 she has a very serious eye infection she nearly loses her eye and her father sort of dials into her predicament and her need for support and help and he brings her back to Ireland to manage his estate as all good fathers do so she sort of becomes the mistress of the estate now her father had over the course of his life managed to be the father of 22 children to four marriages

Mariah's one of the oldest.

Yeah.

So, but he's, he's sort of, although Ramesses has the edge on him by several orders of magnitude, it's still an impressive effort there.

It certainly does.

So there's four marriages in the mix.

And the last of these marriages is to a woman who's just a year older than Mariah herself.

Her name's Frances.

And Mariah and Frances, her stepmother, actually become very, very close friends and remain friends their whole lives.

It's because of her father's final marriage to Francis that Maria Edgeworth ends up traveling to the continent.

She goes to France.

And it's while in France that she receives a marriage proposal from a Swedish courtier, which she thinks about accepting, as so many of the women in this story have done.

She considers accepting it.

And then she realizes that she is going to have a much more

autonomous, free, self-determined life if she returns to Ireland and pursues her writing.

So one of the sort of themes that's coming out of all these stories and that I want to import into our understanding of Jane Austen is that there is a really strong template for being a professional writer in the late 18th and early 19th century.

There are lots of women who are doing it and they're using this new form of the novel