FEATURED AUTHOR - D. Lynn Robinson is a mom of five and has been writing fiction all her life, and publishing novels since 2019. A lover of the outdoors, she enjoys hiking, swimming, and warm sandy beaches. When she’s not in the water, you can find her horseback riding with her husband Joe on one of the many trails Idaho has to offer. The Last Indigo and the Beast of Epicerra is her first fantasy chapter book, and a project deeply important to her. She believes that great stories have the power to enrich lives…
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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.