Sophie Gee

It's a very popular way of writing about women's real experience and the true predicament of women who are sort of trapped in this system of marriage.

It's a way of carving out an identity for oneself as a career woman, as a professional writer.

That's totally correct.

And Maria Edgeworth totally pulls it off.

So encouraged by her father, edited, in fact, by her father and sort of sometimes censored by her father, the consensus is that her writing is much more interesting when it's the version that her father didn't kind of get his hands on.

She churned out a lot of stuff.

She wrote three early novels, Tales of Fashionable Life, The Absentee and Almond, which are all about

life in Ireland.

She became a celebrated writer, mostly off Castle Rackrent, which was, it's a bit of a Northanger Abbey.

It's a parody of incompetent Protestant Irish gentry.

And so she's really the first person to turn the realist lens on what life is like for the gentry in Ireland.

Castle Rackrent is a huge success, and she becomes a sort of literary celebrity.

She finds herself in London on a kind of book tour.

She meets Lord Byron in 1813.

They

instantly dislike one another, or she instantly dislikes him, which really attests to her good judgment.

She gets a fan letter from Walter Scott, the famous historical novelist of the period, who acknowledges Maria's influence on his own novel Waverley and its successors.

Mariah writes back.

They actually become friends.

They visit one another's estates.