Helen

Maria Edgeworth is largely read in literature studies classes today, but between 1800 and 1810, she was the best-recognized, and most popular novelist in the English-speaking world. A fine children's writer as well as a novelist, Maria was born in 1868 in Oxfordshire, of Anglo-Irish gentry. Greatly influenced by her powerful and genteel father, Maria was the second-oldest daughter of a family that eventually, after four marriages, grew to encompass twenty-two children. Maria's writings on the education of children were primarily composed to advance her father's ideas, only later becoming Maria's own. Perhaps best-known today for her short novel of Anglo-Irish landed gentry, "Castle Rackrent," her novel "Helen" was a novel of "sensibility," telling the story of a simple, naturally-attractive and kind young woman, whose kindness and efforts to "save" her friends from certain trouble leads to trouble for Helen herself. "Helen" was Maria Edgeworth's penultimate novel, popular at its first publication in 1837. Readers of Jane Austen and other later British novelists of manners and customs will enjoy Maria Edgeworth, finding a writer of great sensitivity and insight into the human condition.