'A raking pot of tea': The intersecting circles of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth

A feminist dialogic reading of the silent intertextual conversation between Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth reveals that, while they never met, each read the other avidly, learned from the other, and appropriated freely and creatively themes, characters, techniques, and images. Austen follows Edgeworth's stylistic leads, cites her, parodies her, and points to her as a referent for more specific information about attitudes and social conditions. Austen carries on a sustained, often friendly, occasionally antagonistic conversation with Edgeworth all through the medium of the text, while Edgeworth similarly incorporates Austen's voice in three late novels.;The conversation, itself reflecting a feminist impulse to seek other female voices and models, focuses on a number of feminist challenges to institutional patriarchy and its treatment of women. Through this perspective Edgeworth first, and Austen in turn, viewed and depicted abusive landlords, absentees, slaveholders, seducers, tyrannical fathers, husbands, brothers, and loving mentors who attempt to repress the voice and opinions of women. Both writers counter such figures and forces with dramatic portraits of energetic, intelligent, and self-educating women who break through the circles which attempt to circumscribe them.;Examining Austen in the context of Edgeworth confirms recent interpretations of the "horror" implicit in Northanger Abbey and a reading of Emma as a strong feminist novel. It also leads to a new reading of Mansfield Park as a subtly tragic examination of a degenerate gentry class with the moral corruption of Fanny Price as its central theme. Mansfield Park is pivotal to the dialogue; its analysis reveals the voice of Edgeworth everywhere submerged. Mansfield Park, in turn, is the text which most strongly influenced Edgeworth; it leads to her finest novel, Ormond. Reading Edgeworth in the context of Austen reveals Edgeworth as a powerful, insightful, and gifted novelist whose works Austen and her contemporaries respected and enjoyed highly. Edgeworth, a key figure in the evolution of the novel, is a rewarding novelist in her own right; her long neglect needs redress.