“The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth
By Jeanna Smialek
Knopf, 304 pages, $32
In the summer of 1822, as crop failures left parts of Ireland hungry, the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth wrote to her friend David Ricardo with a question: Was Ireland wise to depend so heavily on potatoes? Ricardo, the day's leading economist, thought not. Ireland was mistaken, he warned, in relying on a crop prone to failure. Poor families that could afford only potatoes would have nothing to fall back on when the crop gave out.
Edgeworth was unconvinced. Her inquiries among farmers on her family's estate at Edgeworthstown, Ireland, showed that potatoes were the most profitable crop. She believed failures could be managed with better storage and information about where supplies were plentiful.
Two decades later, the Great Famine arrived. By 1847, roughly 3,000 of the 5,000 people at Edgeworthstown were hungry, and Edgeworth, nearly 80, went from door to door with baskets of provisions. The famine, Jeanna Smialek writes, "would finally change Maria Edgeworth's mind."
If only people today were as willing to revise their views in light of fresh evidence. Edgeworth's intellectual honesty is one of many reasons to welcome Ms. Smialek's biography, "The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth: How a Nineteenth-Century Novelist Taught the World Economics."
Ms. Smialek, a journalist and the author of "Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis" (2023), shows how Edgeworth (1768-1849) wove Adam Smith's new science of political economy into novels and children's stories that would be read across the Western world.
In her day, Edgeworth was a literary celebrity. Jane Austen, far less celebrated at the time, wrote to her niece in 1814 that she had resolved to like no novels "but Miss Edgeworth's, Yours & my own." Edgeworth was the most commercially successful novelist of her era until Walter Scott. She earned about GBP 11,000 from her writing over her career, equivalent to about $1.7 million today. That compares with about GBP 630 in lifetime earnings for Austen and GBP 1,500 for Charlotte Bronte. She was arguably the J.K. Rowling of her age, wrapping moral and economic lessons for the young into popular stories. Yet today Edgeworth, as Ms. Smialek puts it, is a footnote.
Edgeworth's interest in economics began with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a charismatic inventor and landowner who married four times and fathered 22 surviving children. He chose Maria, his eldest daughter, as his assistant in managing the family's estate. This practical education complemented her reading of Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Her literary career was delayed by more than a decade by the influence of Thomas Day, a family friend who disapproved of women publishing. After Day died, her works poured from the presses.
Edgeworth's central conviction, that education can defeat poverty, is as relevant now as it was then.
In an unpublished essay written around 1800, co-authored with her father, she argued that "in England a man who can read & write may make his way to the first offices of the state, but there is no possibility that this eminence should be attained by an illiterate poor." As Ms. Smialek explains, "the Edgeworths believed poverty and disadvantage should not be a dead-end, static state.
The laboring classes should have the opportunity to raise their own position in society through effort and good behavior."
Edgeworth carried the argument into her fiction. In "Ennui" (1809), the estate agent McLeod doubts "whether anything effectual can be done" for the Irish poor "till they have better education," while a neighboring landlord insists that teaching the poor to read is "adding fuel to fire." Edgeworth leaves no doubt which is the hero.
Ms. Smialek interweaves Edgeworth's story with economic debates of her time, which remain debates in ours. Edgeworth was close friends with Malthus and Ricardo and with the economist Richard Jones, who "sought her counsel." She advised the Irish politician Thomas Spring Rice, later the British chancellor of the exchequer, on relief for and education of the poor.
The famine tested Edgeworth's free-market principles. She had long preferred providing jobs to handing out relief. But when hungry men were too weak to work, and no seed was available to plant, she concluded that "the reasonable and large-minded political economist would allow that exigencies require exceptions." Economists have often found that theories cannot substitute for evidence. Yet Ms. Smialek notes that some British officials still invoked Malthus to justify withholding aid.
Ms. Smialek also introduces other women of the period who wrote about economics, including Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau. The author recounts how Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, published in the 1890s, included an entry on Edgeworth, written by Clara Elizabeth Collet. A major contributor to that dictionary was Edgeworth's nephew Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, the economist who lives on in the Edgeworth box taught to economics students today. It was Maria, Ms. Smialek notes, who first put Adam Smith into his father's hands.
Ms. Smialek makes the dismal science come alive with a journalist's fluidity. The book shows Edgeworth as a gifted translator of economic ideas, carrying the arguments of Smith, Malthus and Ricardo to readers young and old who would never open a treatise.
One episode, omitted by Ms. Smialek, shows Edgeworth's receptiveness to self-correction. In 1815, Rachel Mordecai, a Jewish schoolteacher in North Carolina, wrote to Edgeworth objecting to portrayals of Jews in her fiction, notably a villainous London coachmaker named Mordicai in "The Absentee" (1812). Edgeworth, who had used similar caricatures in other stories, was moved. Her next novel, "Harrington" (1817), follows its narrator from a childhood fear of Jews to admiration for them. The two women corresponded for the rest of Mordecai's life, and after she married Aaron Lazarus, she named her first child Marx Edgeworth Lazarus.
Ms. Smialek suggests that Maria Edgeworth has fallen into the twilight of history. Her book may well lead a revival.
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Ms. Furchtgott-Roth is a distinguished fellow at the Energy Policy Research Foundation and the author of "Women's Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America."” [1]
1. A Light on the Dismal Science. Furchtgott-Roth, Diana. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 14 Oct 2026: A15.
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