Hot Sale The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth

The Regency novelist who outsold Austen, and wrote the rules to a new era

Envied by Lord Byron, admired by Jane Austen, read avidly by the British royalty: this is the story of The Great Maria.

Maria Edgeworth, known to her contemporaries as ‘the Great Maria’, was one of the most important authors of the Regency era. Her work was the envy of Lord Byron, Humphry Davy and Walter Scott, and at the height of her powers she was outselling Jane Austen.

But she was far more than a novelist and a society fixture: she was also a covert economist, collaborating with David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus right at the dawn of modern economic thought. As the earliest theorists were establishing their philosophies on production and investment, Edgeworth was publishing dozens of stories with lessons on finance, society and trade tucked into their plots.

In The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth, journalist Jeanna Smialek