Page:Castle Rackrent and The Absentee - Edgeworth (1895).djvu/30

xxvi extraordinary quickness and cleverness; and it must be remembered, in trying to measure her place in literature, that in her day the whole great school of English philosophical romance was in its cradle; George Eliot was not in existence; my father was born in the year in which the Absentee was published. Sir Walter Scott has told us that it was Miss Edgeworth's writing which first suggested to him the idea of writing about Scotland and its national life. Tourgenieff in the same way says that it was after reading her books on Ireland that he began to write of his own country and of Russian peasants as he did. Miss Edgeworth was the creator of her own special world of fiction, though the active Mr. Edgeworth crossed the ts and dotted the is, interpolated, expurgated, to his own and Maria's satisfaction. She was essentially a modest woman; she gratefully accepted his criticism and emendations. Mr. Clark Russell quotes Sydney Smith, who declared that Mr. Edgeworth must have written or burst. "A discharge of ink was an evacuation absolutely necessary to avoid fatal and plethoric congestion." The only wonder is that, considering all they went through, his daughter's stories survived to tell their tale, and to tell it so well, with directness and conviction, that best of salt in any literary work. A letter Maria wrote to her cousin will be remembered. "I beg, dear Sophy," she says, "that you will not call my stories by the sublime name of my works; I shall else be ashamed when the little mouse comes forth."

Maria's correspondence is delightful, and conveys us right away into that bygone age. The figures rapidly move across her scene, talking and unconsciously describing themselves as they go; you see them all through the eyes of the observant little lady. She did not go very