Clearly, this account of Maria Egdeworth is not only one of the most compelling I have ever read, but it also delves deeply into the Whiggish beliefs and ideals. Michael Hurst provides an insightful account of Edgeworth and is a pure genius. He deserves a place in history as one of the foremost scholars in his field.

I was anxious to read this book because I've always enjoyed 18th and 19th century literature, and believed that the humor found in the works of Austen and Burney were overlooked and undermentioned. Author Bilger examines the works of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, and posits that the humor they used was subversive -- laughter at the expense of the overbearing patriarchal culture in which they lived.

While this isn't exactly what I'd hoped it would be, it was more accessible than many scholarly works, and after I got into the rhythm and jargon of the academic writing, I found myself entertained as well as informed -- such a lovely combination.

Laughter is a commodity too often ignored and a tool too often overlooked, but the author makes her case that these three authors consciously used satire, burlesque and parody to criticize their culture while maintaining the guise of docile co-conspirators. Bilger begins with interesting chapters on women & comedy and Mary Shelley's feminism before discussing the lives of her subjects, their beliefs and their use of comedic technique and characters to undermine the dominant paradigm, as it were. Naive observers, female tricksters, competitive women, nimcompoop suitors and ignorant patriarchs are described and then illustrated with short excerpts from the many works by these talented authors -- in particular Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey; Burney's Camilla and The Wanderer; and Edgeworth's Belinda and Helen.

I thought the most interesting chapter was on "goblin humor", dark humor that is still considered distasteful by many and seems shocking when found in these quiet comedies of manners. Here the author displayed a mastery of comic theory as well as the literature, and made her case admirably, without descent into the jargon-laden victimization theory that dominates feminist film theory, for example. Rather, Bilger posits that Austen, Burney and Edgeworth found an outlet for what they could have considered a hopeless situation, and that they consciously and actively did their best to undermine the system in which they lived, reflecting and building upon the work of earlier feminists, and sending out beacons of camaraderie to women living under cultural and personal subjugation.

The book concludes with a fine Notes section, a bibliography and a good index.

I read the book based on reader recommendations that equated 'Belinda' with Jane Austen's work. I had high expectations but struggled to read the book to the end. I found the writing at certain points more like an essay than a novel. Her character development seems forced, and there is little ambient description. Those interested in tracing literary associations of Jane Austen should probably read the book, but if you've read all of Austen's work and are desperately looking for something 'similar' to her style and quality, I would recommend you look elsewhere.

Why I never heard about this book until I stumbled upon it online, I will never know! This is as good as any Jane Austen novel, and should have a BBC film of it's own.

Besides this being as readable as Jane Austen, this book is witty and intelligent. It raises thought provoking questions about gender roles and transgression that suggest that Edgeworth was not an ordinary woman. Unfortunately, like many other 18th C. novels, the book ends with all the usual conventions intact. The women who cross dress (and the man who cross-dresses!) are returned to their spheres and/or married. Don't get me wrong though, this book is quite innovative. I don't know of many literary women having duels and stepping in iron traps that cut up their legs. Also particularly interesting is Edgeworth's treatment of colonialism: there is a cross-racial marriage that is entirely sanctioned. And yet the thought of the heroine marrying a creole is not approved. It is much better for her to marry an Englishman in the parliament. This is a delightful book that would entertain romantics and scholars. I would like to think that I am both, though.

This book is simply boring. There are fun things to it, especially if you know your Irish history, but these out-of-date parodies are still not good enough to make it worth reading. Under the narrative of Thady Quirk, which is -- at least to me -- fairly hard to get through, we are taken through the history of a protestant landlord family. If you truly dissect the book, there are interesting sides of it, but just as a plain reading, I found it simply boring. It is short and doesn't go into any detailed description of the many events that are told to the reader/listener, it's value were supposedly the mocking of the protestant ruling class of Ireland. Since that value is lost to most contemporary readers, there isn't all that much left.

Maria Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent," published in 1800, the year of Irish union with Great Britain, and just two years after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, is supposedly a comic satire intended to show after years of unrest, that the Irish were civil enough to be assimilated into the British Empire. That is a deceptively simple description of a book in conflict with its author and itself.

Told to an "editor" by Thady Quirk, the 80+ year old steward of the Rackrent estate relates (very quickly) the story of the Rackrent family, Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and the absolutely dissolute Sir Condy. The O'Shaughlin family is forced by the Penal Laws to become Protestant and to change their name to Rackrent to regain their estate. The variously weak Rackrent men and their extremely strong and independent wives spend themselves into outrageous debt and tax their tenant farmers to the point of insanity over the course of the novel.

Apply Katie Trumpener's argument regarding the importance of the bog to Irish cultural nationalism in her book "Bardic Nationalism," and you begin to see that, all that seems to preserve the legacy of the O'Shaughlin family is their mucky bog, Allyballycarricko'shaughlin, and Thady Quirk, if he is to be trusted, himself seemingly stuck in a feudal past.

One of the major questions posed by Edgeworth's novel is "What is it to be Irish?" The Anglo-Irish Rackrent landlords claim an Irish Catholic heritage, but forfeit that personal history for the ephemeral run of the estate. The disenfranchised tenant farmers are forced to yield their produce to support the Rackrents's absurd behaviours. In the middle of this dynamic stand the novel's two most developed and challenging characters, Sir Condy Rackrent and Jason McQuirk, Thady's son. Raised in identical circumstances, these two seem to mark the novel's ultimate judgment on the future of Ireland. Is Condy the last of the feudal Irish aristocracy? Does Jason represent the model for the "British" assimilated Irishman?

Can outsiders even fathom Irishness? An almost comically unwieldy editorial apparatus, including a glossary and internal footnotes try to neutralize the foreignness and threat of the Irish for Edgeworth's intended British audience. "Castle Rackrent" is indeed an ambivalent testament to the future of the Irish nation as it is swallowed up into the British Empire at the turn of the 19th century, and an intriguing read.

Edgeworth wrote about the protestant upper class in Ireland around the turn of the 18th/19th century. At the time, especially in Rackrent, her most famous work, she wrote of the machinations of bad landlords and how their families died out. It is interesting that she was writing about the demise of these bad landlords, suggesting that things had improved in this more enlightened age, at a time when the Irish Peasant was worse off than ever. Edgeworth wrote of a society that was on the brink of extinction, but she was not aware of this, since she was part of that society. This book is noteworthy for what it is not. It is not Irish literature. It is poor british literature and would have no merit at all if it did not serve to contrast with the high quality scribblings of the uneducated and unwashed downtrodden masses. Like the protestant ruling class it is sparse, stilted and haughty. Not a fun read.

This is the story of Ormond, an orphan who is raised and influenced by several very different men. It is a reflective story, but not a slow-read. You learn how Ormond chooses his values and learns how to judge people based upon his own opinions and beliefs, not what others try to tell him. It is a good novel, worth reading, not necessarily a great "adventure" but more a life story about how a young boy grows up and becomes a man---one with morals, when those around him sometimes lack all morality.