Maria Edgeworth was an Irish writer who wrote about national identity, gender roles, and social issues.[2] Her novels include Ennui, Castle Rackrent (1800), and The Absentee (1812).[3]
The pre-publication history of the novel is unclear.[4] While Edgeworth wrote in an 1805 letter that she was "finishing Ennui", her father later wrote that she substantially revised it after 1805, and she included scenes inspired from an 1806 event.[4] She probably continued writing and revising the novel until a year or two before its 1809 publication.[5] The novel was published shortly after the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the official union between Ireland and Britain in 1800.[1] It was inspired in part by Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794), a medical tract discussing ennui by a family friend, and William Cullen's First Lines of the Practice of Physic (1777–1784).[6] The novel was written during a time of great literary interest in ennui, including Thomas Skinner Surr's A Winter in London (1806) and several stories in Lady's Magazine.[7]
Edgeworth published the novel alongside two others in her Tales of Fashionable Life, a collection of scandalous stories in the model of other commercially successful writing.[8] By 1813, Edgeworth published three further editions of the text, and her Tales were successful.[9]
