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    The Absentee
    The Absentee
    The Absentee
    Ebook345 pages6 hours

    The Absentee

    By Maria Edgeworth

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The Absentee is a novel by Maria Edgeworth, published in 1812 in Tales of Fashionable Life, that expresses the systemic evils of the absentee landlord class of Anglo-Irish and the desperate condition of the Irish peasantry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMaria Edgeworth
    Release dateMay 21, 2015
    ISBN9786050381092
    The Absentee
    Author

    Maria Edgeworth

    Although born in England in 1768, Maria Edgeworth was raised in Ireland from a young age after the death of her mother. After nearly losing her sight at age fourteen, Edgeworth was tutored at home by her father, helping to run their estate and taking charge of her younger siblings. Over the course of her life she collaborated and published books with her father, and produced many more of her own adult and children’s works, including such classics as Castle Rackrent, Patronage, Belinda, Ormond and The Absentee. Edgeworth spent her entire life on the family estate, but kept up friendships and correspondences with her contemporaries Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and her writing had a profound influence upon Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. Edgeworth was outspoken on the issues of poverty, women’s rights, and racial inequalities. During the beginnings of famine in Ireland, Edgeworth worked in relief and support of the sick and destitute. She died in 1849 at the age of 81.

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    Reviews for The Absentee

    3.5/5

    57 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This was really quite enjoyable. Helped, I think, by the recent tutoured read by Liz of Edgeworth's Belinda and the quite detailed introduction. I'm not sure of those two got me in the right mindset to read this, or put it all into context, but it helped. It's a story of an heir to an estate in Ireland who is comming of age in London where his parents reside, as absentee landlords to their estate. He has a fondness for his home and so goes on a tour of the country and finds that one part of the esatate has a good overseer and the other does not. One part of the estate has tenants who are hard working, and a credit to themselves and their landlord, the other has bribery, underhand dealings, falling down houses and an oppressed tenantry. He then takes matters into his own hands and makes his social ladder climbing mother see that actually she fits back in Ireland a lot better than in London, and that they should return. It is slightly complicated by his search for a wife. He has a fondness for the woman brought up as his cousin, who in fact is the (believed) illigitimate child of his uncle's first wife, and so not a blood relative at all. There is a lot going on slightly off stage, for want of a better description. This is set not long after the Union of Ireland with the rest of Britian into the UK, and so there is a fair amount of them & us going on, on both sides of the irish sea. This os not always evident, but in the choice of Grace Nugent as the cousin's name, Edgeworth was tapping into a thread of folk history related to the surname and the name Grace Nugent itself that gives her position within the family and her relationship (or possible relationship) with the heir a different spin. It's all very interesting and quite easy to read. A great social portrait of society at the time, with the poorer tenants featuring as well as the upper classes.
    • 1/5
      The Absentee, published in 1812, is not a book I could make myself finish. The characters are either too perfect or too pathetic, and the subject matter is simply depressing. It is all about the problem of "absentee" landlords from Ireland in the early 1900s, trying to push their way up the social ladder in London society. They don't have the money for it, most of them, and they mismanage their estates because they are never there to do things properly. And all for the privilege of participating in a society where the established members of the ton despise them and only interact with them to eat their dinners and enjoy a sense of superiority over the Irish upstarts. Not exactly an engaging topic.Nor are the characters compelling. Lady Clonbrony is snubbed again and again by her English peers, but pathetically keeps trying to win (buy) her way into the inner circle. Sounds too much like high school social cliques and drama to make me enjoy this character. She has, of course, a perfect and clearsighted son in Lord Colambre, who suffers in watching his mother waste money and his father plunge ever deeper into debt as he neglects the family estates in Ireland. There is also a cousin/ward, Grace Nugent, who is the perfect match for Lord Colambre but who, of course, has never dreamed of such a thing. Colambre must marry well and despite her many perfections, Grace has a questionable background which renders her, in Colambre's uptight sense of things, quite ineligible. Unfortunately this is the first Maria Edgeworth title I've attempted, and I'm not hurrying back for more. There is some wit and humor to her writing, I suppose, but it's blunted by the boring stock characters and predictable, rather threadbare plotline.
    • 5/5
      I really liked this book. You could see the ending coming a mile off, but that didn't really spoil it. I enjoyed the characters: they were written very humorously, almost as caricatures, yet were very well developed and very 'real'.Edgeworth's prose style is open and accessible, and contrasts with the more flowery writing of the contemporary Gothic genre. While the events of the novel are very much of their time (the book was first published in 1812), the characters could be from any period, and there are many modern parallels. The author's passion for Ireland, political convictions and concern for the Irish people all come through strongly. Although it is a very political novel, it is not a political story; for those who are entirely uninterested in early nineteenth century Anglo-Irish absenteeism (which, I should think, is most people), the book is entertaining for its own sake.
    • 5/5
      I really liked this book. You could see the ending coming a mile off, but that didn't really spoil it. I enjoyed the characters: they were written very humorously, almost as caricatures, yet were very well developed and very 'real'.Edgeworth's prose style is open and accessible, and contrasts with the more flowery writing of the contemporary Gothic genre. While the events of the novel are very much of their time (the book was first published in 1812), the characters could be from any period, and there are many modern parallels. The author's passion for Ireland, political convictions and concern for the Irish people all come through strongly. Although it is a very political novel, it is not a political story; for those who are entirely uninterested in early nineteenth century Anglo-Irish absenteeism (which, I should think, is most people), the book is entertaining for its own sake.
    • 1/5
      The Absentee, published in 1812, is not a book I could make myself finish. The characters are either too perfect or too pathetic, and the subject matter is simply depressing. It is all about the problem of "absentee" landlords from Ireland in the early 1900s, trying to push their way up the social ladder in London society. They don't have the money for it, most of them, and they mismanage their estates because they are never there to do things properly. And all for the privilege of participating in a society where the established members of the ton despise them and only interact with them to eat their dinners and enjoy a sense of superiority over the Irish upstarts. Not exactly an engaging topic.Nor are the characters compelling. Lady Clonbrony is snubbed again and again by her English peers, but pathetically keeps trying to win (buy) her way into the inner circle. Sounds too much like high school social cliques and drama to make me enjoy this character. She has, of course, a perfect and clearsighted son in Lord Colambre, who suffers in watching his mother waste money and his father plunge ever deeper into debt as he neglects the family estates in Ireland. There is also a cousin/ward, Grace Nugent, who is the perfect match for Lord Colambre but who, of course, has never dreamed of such a thing. Colambre must marry well and despite her many perfections, Grace has a questionable background which renders her, in Colambre's uptight sense of things, quite ineligible. Unfortunately this is the first Maria Edgeworth title I've attempted, and I'm not hurrying back for more. There is some wit and humor to her writing, I suppose, but it's blunted by the boring stock characters and predictable, rather threadbare plotline.

    Book preview

    The Absentee - Maria Edgeworth

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