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In eighteenth-century Ireland, a privileged class of Anglo-Irish landowners known as the “Protestant Ascendancy” lived on great estates, with the mostly-Catholic Irish as their tenants and servants. Maria Edgeworth was part of this Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Castle Rackrent, her best known novel, satirizes the failures and follies of her Anglo-Irish peers, their mismanagement of their estates, and their abuse of their Irish tenants. The narrator of Castle Rackrent is Thady Quirk, whose family has served on the Rackrent estate for generations. Thady relates the life stories of four successive lords of Castle Rackrent and how their individual character and personality affect the lives and families that depend on them. Castle Rackrent was one of the first historical novels written in English, and Walter Scott later cited it as inspiration for his own Scottish historical novels. Edgeworth included two sets of explanatory notes on aspects of Irish life and culture for her English readers, footnotes in the main text and a “glossary” added in the second edition. These have been merged into a single set of endnotes in this Standard Ebooks edition. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Reproduction of the original: Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth
Thady Quirk, steward to the decaying estate of the Rackrent family, narrates a story of four generations of a dying dynasty in Castle Rackrent. This volume also includes Ennui, the entertaining confessions of the Earl of Glenthorn, a bored aristocrat. Both novels offer a darkly comic and satirical expose of the Irish class system.
The only edition of this 1800 novel--widely regarded as the first historical novel--to include supporting materials on both the importance of Maria Edgeworth as a writer and the influence of contemporary history on this novel.
On the eve of his coming of age, a young Lord begins to see the truth of his parents' lives: his mother cannot buy her way into society no matter how hard he tries, and his father is being ruined by her continued attempts. The young Lord then travels to his home in Ireland, encountering adventure on the way, and discovers that the native residents are being exploited in his father's absence.