“Consuming Romantic Ireland: Maria Edgeworth as Tourist In Ireland’s Wild West”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Maria Edgeworth’s letter describing her 1833 tour of Connemara in Ireland’s wild west has received relatively little critical attention. Yet the letter has the candid spontaneity of writing never intended for publication, revealing a side of Edgeworth rarely glimpsed in her published works. So strong was her childlike curiosity regarding this alien world, which lay just a hundred miles from her home, that Edgeworth, then in her 60s, was willing to brave the inhospitable terrain to see its natural wonders. However, throughout the letter she expresses fear and suspicion of the “natives” whose mediation is necessary for her to access those wonders. To make sense of Connemara’s strange landscape and people, Edgeworth deploys three distinct constructions of “nature”: a rational nature that had been tamed and rendered productive; a picturesque, commodified nature of discrete sites the burgeoning tourist industry had identified as attractions; and a wild, Romantic nature of mythic prehistory that she longs to experience for herself. As this article argues, each of these “natures” founders in the contact zone, in part because the reality of the region exceeds the interpretive frameworks available to Edgeworth, but also because her own emotional responses defy her attempts at narrative regulation.