Castle Rackrent

(1800)

From Tales and Novels Volume 4.

The title page of her first and most famous Irish tale which she first had published anonymously, Castle Rackrent (1800), says;

"an Hibernian Tale. Taken from facts, and from the manners of the Irish squires, before the year 1782".

Edgeworth employs a rarely used device of narrator telling the tale of the decline of a fictional family of profligate landlords. King George the III, after reading it said, "I know something now of my Irish subjects". It is said that the seeming class bias against the landlords of Maria's Irish tales, especially absentee ones, is purely accidental. She was not a radical as one might intimate from Rackrent. The editor hopes his readers will observe that these are 'tales of other times;' that the manners depicted in the following pages are not those of the present age; the race of the Rackrents has long since been extinct in Ireland; and the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy, are characters which could no more be met with at present in Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson Trulliber in England. There is a time when individuals can bear to be rallied for their past follies and absurdities, after they have acquired new habits and a new consciousness. Nations, as well as individuals, gradually lose attachment to their identity, and the present generation is amused, rather than offended, by the ridicule that is thrown upon its ancestors.--from the Author's Preface

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