Maria Edgeworth

The life of the Irish novelist who wrote Castle Rackrent and taught Walter Scott what a regional novel could do: the Edgeworthstown estate, the formidable father, the educational treatises and the fifty years of quiet work. Helen Zimmern wrote it in 1883 for the Eminent Women series. She is good on the collaboration with Richard Lovell Edgeworth, which was closer and stranger than most literary partnerships. Fifty-nine plates after Millais, Frith, Tissot and others carry the Victorian gallery of portraits and generations that Zimmern's readers would have recognized at once.