Castle Rackrent is unusual among Maria Rackrent's works in that it is one of the few novels she wrote that was not edited by her father. Published in 1800, it is a short novel / novella that tells the story of four heirs to the Rackrent fortune as seen through the eyes of their steward, Thady Quirk. Each is more fiscally incompetent than the next, and the only person who can see a way in which this mismanagement can be reversed is the narrator's son, Jason.
For a short novel, Castle Rackrent has lofty historical importance and is the bearer of a great many literary "firsts", including first Anglo-Irish novel, first historical novel and the first novel to spawn a series or saga (it became the first in a series known as the Big House Saga.) Maria Edgeworth was as similarly groundbreaking as this work; she ws one of the prominent figures in the development of the novel as a genre of writing in Europe and wrote for both adults and children. She was also extremely interested in non-literary topics, such as economics and political history, that she managed to intertwine with the more pastoral aspects of her fiction.
Her opinions were often somewhat controversial, but softened through the telling of stories. Living much of her adult life in Ireland, having grown up in England, she became extremely conscious of social divisions on the grounds of religion and was vehemently opposed to any Acts of Parliament that incorporated or enabled them. She was also quite progressive, believing in co-educational schooling, the Act of Union that brought Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom, and women's emancipation, eschewing arranged or expected marriage and espousing enthusiastically on a woman's right to a career if she so wanted one.
During the first fourteen years of the nineteenth century, Edgeworth was England's most successful and influential living novelist. She passed away at the age of eighty-one.
