FEATURED AUTHOR - Brian Terenna is a dystopian, sci-fi, dark fantasy author. He grew up in a land of possibilities. He saw a path to all of them, but could only pick one. Now, he creates worlds, where fantasy is reality and reality is anything you make it. Brian has a strong preference for complex, mysterious, imaginative fiction, with intellectually powerful characters that achieve amazing feats. His favorite authors are Brandon Sanderson, Pierce Brown, Mark Lawrence, and Patrick Rothfuss. And loves dark…
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Recent comments: User reviews
Maria Edgeworth's novels Castle Rackrent and The Absentee did much to "raise the consciousness" of the public to the plight of the tenant farmers in nineteenth-century Ireland. Her influence resounded in the political debate for decades afterward. In this regard, Edgeworth is no less important to Irish history than is Harriet Beecher Stowe to American history.
Wikipedia cites the scholarship of Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick as it notes that Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent "is often regarded as the first historical novel, the first regional novel in English, the first Anglo-Irish novel, the first Big House novel, and the first saga novel." Potatoes and bushels, indeed.
In her novels, Edgeworth placed much of the blame for the condition of the tenants on what we can call "rule from afar:" that human tendency to slide into casual misrule when distant from those whose lives one controls. History abounds with examples.
If the political ideology we see in the review has blinded the reviewer to this essential lesson of The Absentee, then that ideology serves him ill indeed.