Maria Edgeworth Letters

The Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) was the most commercially successful novelist of her age and a favorite author of Jane Austen's. She was an extraordinary woman writing at the turn of the nineteenth century whose ideas on gender, race, religion, education, and science have important ramifications today. Her life in Ireland spanned the upheaval of the 1798 Rebellion to the beginning of the Great Famine, and her network included correspondents in Europe, North America and India. She was one of the first authors of fiction specifically written for children. However, a comparatively small number of her letters have been published. The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (https://mariaedgeworth.org/) seeks to remedy this gap in scholarship by creating a digital space where Edgeworth’s full correspondence is made available, searchable, and is eventually annotated through a collaborative open-access project. Transcriptions created through the Zooniverse platform will be checked, encoded, and eventually added to our digital archive for researchers.