The Absentee

Irish author Maria Edgeworth was one of the chief early practitioners of more modern novels in English, as well as being one of the pioneering Anglo-Irish authors. Born in 1867, one of her best-known novels is "Castle Rackrent" (1800), often considered to be a prototypical Gothic novel. In 1812, she published "The Absentee," a short novel that reflects the serious abuses of absentee British landlords in Ireland at the time. Another protest against this practice, of the same time period, that is perhaps better-known than Edgeworth's finely-written book is Swift's "A Modest Proposal," known to most high school and college students to this day as a well-reasoned justification for selling and cooking unwanted babies and children.