Preferring spinsterhood? Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, and Ireland

Published in 1800, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent has been understood as an act of literary unionism attempting to reconcile both England and Ireland to the controversial Anglo-Irish Union (1801). Yet, the text's final privileging of the Rackrent wives over their husbands subverts any idea of allegorical marriage plot. This paper therefore argues that the triumph of the Rackrent wives, combined with Edgeworth's secretiveness about her tale - the only one of her works begun and largely composed without the input of her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth - highlights an insistence on female self-determination, both for Ireland and for Edgeworth herself.