When Belinda is sent by her aunt, Mrs. Stanhope, to stay with Lady Delacour, she soon realizes that Lady Delacour is not a good role model for a young woman. Lady Delacour is concerned only with popularity and the admiration of London's high society. She pretends to be bright and lively in company, but is very unhappy at home. She is also dying of a cancer in her breast, which has caused her to give up all hope that she could live a good life. As such, she has rejected domestic life, is estranged from her daughter, and argues with her alcoholic husband. Belinda, along with Lady Delacour's...

Castle Rackrent, a short novel by Maria Edgeworth published in 1800, is often regarded as the first historical novel, the first regional novel in English, the first Anglo-Irish novel, the first Big House novel and the first saga novel. It is also widely regarded as the first novel to use the device of a narrator who is both unreliable and an observer of, rather than a player in, the actions he chronicles. Kirkpatrick suggests that it "both borrows from and originates a variety of literary genres and subgenres without neatly fitting into any one of them." 1] William Butler Yeats pronounced...

Lord Colambre, the sensitive hero of the novel, finds that his mother Lady Clonbrony's attempts to buy her way into the high society of London are only ridiculed, while his father, Lord Clonbrony, is in serious debt as a result of his wife's lifestyle. Colambre travels incognito to Ireland to see the country that he still considers his home. When he returns to London he assists his father to pay off the debts, on condition that the Clonbrony family return to live in Ireland. Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1768 - 22 May 1849) was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature....