Women's Writing

Maria Edgeworth in Paris

The Irish novelist and educationalist Maria Edgeworth spent an intense five months in Paris in the Peace of Amiens period between October 1802 and March 1803 (she would revisit the city during another fraught period in French politics in 1820). On arriving in France, Edgeworth found that she was already a celebrated author: Practical Education (1798) and Belinda (1801) had both been translated into French and were widely read. Edgeworth’s social and intellectual life in Paris was full and varied: she went to the theatre, to the newly opened Louvre, and to salons, and discussed Napoleonic politics, literature, theories of language, science, and economics with her new friends and acquaintances. A long and vivid letter written as she prepared to leave Paris for Ireland describes her impressions of Madame de Genlis, whose Adèle et Théodore (1782) she had translated into English as a girl of fifteen for what would have been her first book, if published.

The stay was personally, intellectually and politically significant for Edgeworth’s subsequent writing. Her personal crisis over a proposal of marriage from a Swedish diplomat and inventor, Abram Niklas Edelcrantz, while in Paris coincided with debates over the Napoleonic Consulate’s new Civil Code, which reversed the progress made on women’s legal rights in 1792, tightening the rules for divorce and the recognition of children born outside of marriage, and reinforcing women’s subordination to their husbands and fathers. These debates form an important context for the writing and reception of Madame de Staël’s Delphine (1802), a tragic romance set during the Revolution and centring on questions about marriage and women’s freedom, which was published during Edgeworth’s stay and was avidly read and discussed by her and her Parisian friends. Edgeworth’s Leonora (1806), drafted between November 1803 and June 1804, bears the imprint of Revolutionary and early Napoleonic-era sexual politics and of the ambition Staël raised in Edgeworth to tackle controversial subjects. A number of other fictions also drew on her experiences and the materials gleaned during the Paris visit. For example, Ennui (begun in January 1804 and substantially complete by spring 1805, but not published until 1809) responded to Edgeworth’s eyewitness observations of French post-Revolutionary reconstruction with a tale of adaptation to radical social transformation in Ireland. In addition, the social and creative connections that Edgeworth made in Paris – including her encounter with the Benthamist, Étienne Dumont – were important to her for the next twenty-five years of her writing career.