Reluctant Soldiers and Forgotten Intertexts: The Question of Ireland in Edgeworth's The Absentee and "The Prussian Vase"

Abstract

Abstract:This paper examines Maria Edgeworth's antimilitarism and consciousness as a colonial woman writer by juxtaposing her Irish tale The Absentee (1812) and an understudied tale for young people, "The Prussian Vase" (1801). Against the political turbulence of the years from the 1798 Irish Uprising to the publication of The Absentee, Edgeworth's reluctant soldiers evidence the Anglo-Irish writer's Irish allegiance amid her conflicted stance as an enlightened woman intellectual and a Protestant landlord in impoverished colonial Ireland during Britain's continuing military conflicts with France. Her antimilitarism emerges with clarity when contemporary intertexts are considered, Sir Charles William Pasley's 1811 Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire and Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall's 1798 Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, and Vienna, in the Years 1777, 1778, and 1779.