Disowning to Own: Maria Edgeworth and the Illegitimacy of National Ownership

Abstract

During the days of his life, Walter Scott's thoughts turned confusedly toward Maria Edgeworth, the author to whom he was so consistently linked in his novel production. Both Scott, with his historical popularizations and fictionalizations of Scottish history, and Edgeworth, with her tales of Anglo Irish landlords their Irish estates, were seen as developing the distinct nar rative style of the national tale, a popular Romantic genre of the novel set in the Celtic regions of the British Isles.1 Yet in discussing the female authors of the day, Scott proves unable to remember the name of the writer whom he credited with first inspiring him to write novels of a specifically Celtic national character. Making no reference to his published declaration of a desire to em ulate the admirable Irish portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth,2 nor to the well known story that Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812) revived his flagging com mitment to the manuscript of Waverley (1814), an older Scott instead recol lects her early didactic sketches for children in The Parent's Assistant (1796). He dwells vaguely and condescendingly her powers of sentimental expres sion: Ay, Miss Edgeworth: she's very clever, and best in the little touches too. I'm sure, in that children's story, where the little girl parts with her lamb, and the little boy brings it back to her again, there's nothing for it but just to put down the book, and cry.3 It would be difficult to make an argument about the conscious motivation behind such comments. Recorded as evidence of Scott's declining mental fac ulties (he was, after all, a personal friend of Edgeworth's), the anecdote none theless is suggestive of the gender dynamics behind Scott's position as canonical novelist. Marilyn Butler reads his comments as a distancing gesture, in which Scott pays his last compliments to his women rivals for their beauti fully done small work, while defining himself as an author working on a big ger scale.4 It certainly would not have been the first of Scott's attempts to distinguish his work from Edgeworth's; Katie Trumpener notes his tendency