The Local and the Temporary

Abstract

In recent years, Edgeworth has been remembered, if she has been acknowledged at all, as the writer of Castle Rackrent, an early regional tale, and probably the first novel in English to use the vernacular as its mode of narration. As such, noting its publication date of 1800, it is tempting to see her as one of the early disciples of the romantic movement, striving, like Wordsworth, to discover ‘the real language of men’ as a means of achieving ‘a more permanent and philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets’.