Maria Edgeworth in 1807 by John Downman

THE late 18th century was an emancipatory age for women. It was the age of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen and many others. It was achieved through the medium of the novel, fictional parables that explored morality.

Among them was Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), whose life was closely linked with literary Hampstead, but then slipped from public attention and is currently being rediscovered in a series of international conferences: Rome in 2012; Pennsylvania 2016; Trinity College, Dublin in 2018; York in 2018; and this year in the Sorbonne, Paris, on June 13 and 14.

Maria was Anglo-Irish, the daughter of an unruly Irish youth, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (RLE), whose father had removed him from Trinity college, Dublin, and sent him to live with an English family friend, the Elders, in Black Bourton, where Maria was born and he was enrolled in nearby Oxford university.

Not long after he arrived in Oxfordshire, RLE made Anna Elders, the eldest daughter, pregnant and there was no alternative but to hasten to Gretna Green, where for a few guineas a freelance parson married them to make sure that property inheritance rights went smoothly.

When their baby arrived it was a boy, and he was sent to France for an education, but he ran away to sea and never returned to claim his birthright.

RLE’s next child, was Maria, who was sent to Mrs Latuffiere’s middle-class boarding school in Derby, where rendering her thoughts on to page became second nature.

RLE was forced to live off his wits and moved north to industrial Birmingham, which offered many opportunities to men-on-the-make like himself.

He was invited to join the Lunar Men, so called from their habit of visiting each other on full moon weekends, so that they could find their way home through the town’s unlit streets.

This group was an extraordinary gathering of geniuses.

There was the potter, Josiah Wedgwood, whose decorated dinner sets were sold worldwide.

There was Dr. Erasmus Darwin, whose “survival of the fittest” theory of animal evolution laid the foundation for his grandson, Charles Darwin’s account of “the descent of man” which replaced Genesis with a secular account.

There was James Watt, who mounted steam engines on ribbons of steel laid across the landscape so they could carry people and goods faster than a galloping horse.

But not everyone was convinced by all this innovation.

The French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that these achievements were artificial and illusionary. “Man is born free,” he claimed, “but everywhere he is in chains.”

He thought that the modem problem began in infancy with parents and teachers trying to beat knowledge into children, so his Confessions and his novel Emile were educational parables that found willing readers, especially among women who wanted to be more than baby-producing machines and carers for the sick and elderly.

The big change in father and daughter’s lives occurred in 1782, when RLE’s father died in Ireland and he inherited his Irish estate and returned home.

He put Maria in charge of his growing family – he produced 23 children with four successive wives – and Maria wrote them stories and ran his estate efficiently, while he retreated into his workshop and constructed carriages and telegraph mechanisms and other inventions.

If she wanted to keep up with her Lunar friends it had to be by letter and occasional visits.

Among the houses where she stayed in Hampstead was Marion Hall, where she felt most at home with the Carr family.

She also stayed with Joanne Baillie, the Scottish poet, at Bolton House, and with Anna Laetitia Barbault, who also wrote stories for children and lived in Church Row, possibly at No 8.

She dedicated her first published book, Letters for Literary Ladies, (1795) to these writers.

In one essay in that book on the “Noble Science of Self-Justification”, she mocked men’s self-regard for themselves.

She pointed out how a man in Rome declared himself to be “infallible” – an oblique reference to the Catholicism of her Irish tenantry.

She wrote: “If a man is to me declared infallible, I see no reason why the same privilege should not be extended to a woman. … I address myself chiefly to married ladies; but those of you who have not as yet the good fortune to have that common enemy, a husband, to combat may in the meantime practise my precepts on their fathers, brothers.”

While RLE was alive she toned down her feminist views, but when he died 1817, she gave them free vent.

She had helped him with his memoirs in 1800 and wrote a kind of fictionalised account of the Edgeworth history in Ireland in Castle Rackrent, which was taken as historically accurate by subsequent Irish commentators.

But it was in her five- volume novel, Belinda (1802), that she broke new ground in fiction.

It was the story of a country woman like herself was brought to London by two bizarre and unreliable companions to find a husband.

Black identity, slavery, crossdressing and questions of anti-Imperialism were all among the questions she wove into her story. But she found that it was increasingly difficult to explore such themes in Ireland and she died in 1849 during the Great Irish Famine.

With her passing one of the most original voices departed, but was not forgotten, for over a century.

• Maria Edgeworth is the subject of a two-day international colloquium on June 13 & 14 at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris.
• Bernard Canavan is a London-based Irish artist and historian