Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies Publication Peers and Analytical Antagonists

Abstract

This chapter reexamines Maria Edgeworth’s relationship to Thomas Day through the lens of her intended first publication of de Genlis and of Edgeworth’s careful engagement with his Sandford and Merton to demonstrate that Edgeworth rejected perceived essential association between women and emotion or intellectual inferiority and that she denied domestic utility in arguments on behalf of a woman’s education that went beyond the typical feminine accomplishments. In addition, Edgeworth targeted Mary Wollstonecraft’s endorsement of Day through her deliberate 1798 revision of Letters for Literary Ladies and its invocation of Wollstonecraft’s ‘rights,’ exemplifying the potential for women writers to speak to their peers, both women and men, while they negotiated the business of eighteenth-century publishing.