Helen

By Maria Edgeworth and Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie

Book Overview

She was the bestselling author of Regency England. Admired by Jane Austen whose fame she eclipsed and dubbed 'Our Great Maria' by Sir Walter Scott. John Ruskin declared her work, 'The most re-readable in existence'. Isn't it time we started reading Maria Edgeworth? Written in 1834, Helen was the last and most psychologically powerful of Edgeworth's novels. Newly orphaned Helen Stanley is urged to share the home of her childhood friend Lady Cecilia. This charming socialite, however, is withholding secrets and soon Helen is drawn into a web of 'white lies' and evasions that threaten not only her hopes for marriage but her very place in society. A fascinating panorama of Britain's political and intellectual elite in the early 1800s and a gripping romantic drama. Helen was the inspiration for Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. This edition is introduced by John Mullan, Professor of English at UCL. John Mullan hosts the Guardian Book Club, and contributes regularly to Newsnight Review, LRB and New Statesman. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 198640563X
• ISBN13: 9781986405638
• Release Date: March 2018
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Burney is to Camilla as Edgworth is to Helen

The title of my review may not make sense to readers unfamiliar with the four novels of Frances Burney, nor a bit of biography about the two great women authors, Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. Both Burney's Camilla and Edgeworth's Helen are later works of fiction produced after earlier successes. Both were published after a long break in time in writing. Both are perhaps "overworked," and in reading both, I often think of how much anxiety the heroines exhibit, and I sense anxiety in the authors in themselves being expressed in subtle ways in text. Both texts have great strengths, yet if they are read after the greater works of the authors (Evelina, Cecilia, Belinda, Patronage, The Absentee, Ennui), there is a sad sense of lost compactness, lost power. Both Camilla and Helen are longer than they need be, and I suspect their length is the result of excessive rewriting and anxiety on the part of the two authors. Yet having said that, I would argue that second-rate Edgeworth is superior to a great many authors' best efforts. Helen is at heart a story about friendship and betrayal, selflessness and selfishness, social lies and their cost. As usual, once I start to try to narrow down a theme of Edgeworth's, more and more lessons on life and great human issues emerge from her writing. Edgeworth understands people and the social games they play, and this perceptive power is still fresh and relevant in 2004. The role of women in politics, political intrigue, and power is an important theme in the book; here some women will struggle with Edgeworth's ambiguity and long for the absolute world of Mary Wollstonecraft. But Edgeworth tackles issues on a practical level-unlike Wollstonecraft she is not able to say, "This is how it should be," but rather Edgeworth explores issues in social context. She shows us behavior and the diverse reactions of people in society, leads us to look at different values, different lifestyles. There is in all of Edgeworth's novels, a level of common sense and the way of the world that keeps her novels from becoming too didactic, too formulaic, too visionary, and too melodramatic. Just as things seem to become too serious, too moral, or (horrors!) boring, Edgeworth makes us laugh at the silly ways people try to protect or feed their vanity, self-esteem, or social reputation.