Ancestral voices: Maria Edgeworth and other orphans of British literature (William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Scotland, Sydney, Lady Morgan, Jane Austen)

This project examines Maria Edgeworth's role in shaping Romantic period debates about identity and representation, focusing on contemporary preoccupations with authorial, familial, and national legitimacy. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thinkers viewed the domestic as the fundamental site of social incorporation and thus as pivotal in forming the ethical disposition of the subject. Consequently, individuals (such as orphans or bastards) unanchored from traditional social structures were obliged to cultivate alternative connections, to define themselves within and against protean social, economic, and national communities fraught with revolutionary energies.; Edgeworth's investment in and uneasiness about what she termed the “unconnected being” echoes in the poetry and novels of the period as a manifestation of cultural concerns about dislocation and dispossession. Exploring the gender-inflected intersection of family and nation, this dissertation brings into sharp relief pervasive cultural anxieties about the need to articulate—and to legitimize—one's individual as well as collective identity. Issues of legitimacy were characterized by the literary presence of orphaned children, usurped estates, border wars, and national conflict. I address these issues in discussions that range from “family values” and literary production to the negotiation of the vernacular voice in national fiction and the “bastardization” of Irish culture. In so doing, I pay particular attention to the exigencies of authorship and subsequent innovations in literary form. Edgeworth's own positions as woman writer, Anglo-Irish gentry, and “daddy's girl,” for example, underscore the complexity of these issues. In chapters that compare Maria Edgeworth to Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott and Lady Morgan, this project traces Edgeworth's tremendous influence upon her contemporaries.