Novelist, Maria Edgeworth, Dies in Mostrim, Co. Longford

Novelist Maria Edgeworth dies in Mostrim, Co. Longford. She is laid to rest in a vault at Edgeworthstown Church. The Great Famine, which decimates the people she loves, mars her final years. Even in her late seventies, she works strenuously for their relief.

Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) was a pioneering Anglo-Irish writer and one of the most prominent women authors of her era. Known for novels such as Castle Rackrent, Belinda, and The Absentee, she explored themes of class, gender, Anglo-Irish relations, and education. Deeply attached to the local community in Edgeworthstown, she dedicated her later life to charitable work—especially during the horrors of the Great Famine.

Her death marked the end of an era in Irish letters; her fiction had helped shape early 19th-century literature and inspired writers including Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.