Get Hold Of Castle Rackrent Composed By Maria Edgeworth Released As Readable Copy
nice change to the "this is how you need to behave young lady" novels I've read from this period of English Literature, Very tongueincheek and not too difficult to read, Published inat a time when a novels characters and places were given names which, whilst being silly, were memorable and a helpful prompt to dozing readers like me.
You know exactly who and what they are about, Thus: Rackrent, Stopgap, Skinflint, Moneygawl, Here Maria Edgeworth portrays the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, of which she herself was a part, I read that she wrote as its/their Apologist, Really! To read this is to become further aware of the inevitability of the “Irish Troubles”,
Loyal Catholic subservience to these awful creatures, human in their failings like all of us, could only last so long, Some of this reads like very early Tom Sharpe, The Emerald Isle surely deserved better,
I now need a blast of Stiff Little Fingers, starting with “Alternative Ulster”, I think! Family history
Thady Quirk has lived on the estate of the Rackrent family all his life, and here sets out to tell the story of the four Rackrents who have owned the estate over that period.
The introduction in my Oxford Worlds Classic edition, by Kathryn J Kirkpatrick, is nearly a third as long as the entire novella, and tells us that “Castle Rackrent has gathered a dazzling array of firsts the first regional novel, the first sociohistorical novel, the first Irish novel, the first Big House novel, the first saga novel.
” Whew! But the question is, is it good And for me the answer is its rather underwhelming, not helped in truth by all these accolades and highflown claims which set expectations too high.
In fact, it is a rather slight novella, taking a humorous look at the AngloIrish Protestants who were given land in Ireland in order to subdue the Catholic natives, but then mismanaged it through incompetence or lack of interest.
The Rackrent heirs show all the fecklessness of their class, and all the different weaknesses that lead them to gradually lose their fortune and control of their estates, Spendthrifts, gamblers, drunkards the Rackrents have one thing in common they do nothing to improve the estate, but expect it to provide enough income to pay for their vices.
We see the evils of absentee landlordism and, of course, of rackrenting demanding extortionate rents from tenants on threat of eviction, And we see the slow downfall of the family, helped along by the manipulations of Thadys wily son, who rises to be the estate manager and in time to help the Rackrent dynasty come to its end.
Its written in a form of dialect but clearly aimed at an English readership as much as Irish, so not at all difficult to read, Edgeworth has included what she calls a glossary to explain some terms and traditions which may be unfamiliar to English readers, These take the form of explanatory notes, and are interesting and quite fun, containing some anecdotes to illustrate points she raises in the novella itself,
A mildly entertaining read, then, but I feel its fame is probably mostly for all those “firsts” and for the academic analysis of what the story has to say about the period.
As you can probably tell from this lacklustre review, it didnt inspire me to lavish either praise or scorn a couple of weeks after reading it, it has faded almost completely away.
sitelinkwww. fictionfanblog. wordpress. com Free download available at sitelinkProject Gutenberg,
is pending Dry as all holy hell, but important in terms of earlyC Ireland and the evolution of novelistic conventions, Having finished my previous book at the beginning of a long train journey, and being mindful of not spending any more money and thanking the inventor of the Kindle for letting me carry a virtual library with me everywhere I go, I went for the free and fairly short Castle Rackrent thinking that a quick classic might help the journey to speed by.
But, while short, this bored the ass off me, helping make the journey feel like it was three times longer than it was and driving me to play on my phone as often as possible instead.
Told by Honest Thady, the house servant, Castle Rackrent tells the story of four generations of its owners, charting the rise and fall of their fortunes as the house falls into the hands of the family before passing back out and into those of Thadys son.
Fawning over each of its lords in the telling of their tales while making clear the various character defects that have caused their downfall pennypinching, litigious, degenerate, cruel, or just plain dense, each of the lords are utter knobs Thadys tale is apparently a satire that shouldnt be missed, according to those lists of books you should apparently read before you die.
I beg to differ.
It probably didnt help that Ive had a staggeringly good run of books this year, having enjoyed everything Ive read so far, as well as having also only just put down a much more entertaining book, but the only list that Castle Rackrent is gracing in my head is that of the most dull and underwhelming books Ive ever read.
sitelinkAlso posted at Cannonball Read Readers of Austen and Scott should not miss this one, It's quite short and kinda odd, but funny and fascinating from a historical perspective, Poor old Thady! The glossary in itself is a hoot, And the traditional introduction is not to be missed, but can be saved until the end when you'll be curious about this Maria Edgeworth, “the manners depicted in the following pages are not those of the present age: the race of the Rackrents has long since been extinct in Ireland and the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy, are characters which could no more be met with at present in Ireland ”
I only finished this because it was so short.
Its a bit difficult to read, both due to style and the fact there is more introduction and preface and glossary and footnotes than there is story, And what story is there doesnt amount to much: four generations of heirs, for varying and not very exciting reasons, have trouble hanging on to their estate,
Maybe if I knew more Irish history I would have appreciated the satire, I tried doing some homework, which is almost always necessary for me when reading something from theth century, and that turned out to be the high point of this experience for me.
I didnt know that before the Relief Act of, Irish Catholics couldnt run for parliament or practice law or even inherit land unless they converted to the Church of England.
I also looked up some information about Fairy Mounts, which was a lot of fun, and next time I will read a story about them,
But the book is an important milestone: supposedly the first historical novel, an early use of an unreliable narrator, and purported to do for Ireland what Sir Walter Scott did for Scotland, though I dont really get what this did for Ireland.
What was interesting to me was this early female voice, Its told from the point of view of Thady, longtime steward of the Rackrent family, but you can hear the writers voice come through in the way the female characters are portrayed: causing all kinds of trouble by being so unreasonable as to want to keep their own jewelry or disliking the way their new spouse and home reek of alcohol.
And the very fact that its told by a servant might have been something a male writer couldnt have pulled off as well back then,
But allinall, Im afraid I cant recommend this one, Not exactly a pageturner, but I understand why this made it onto THE LIST,
So, to sum up the novels story, theres this workingclass servant type guy in Ireland named Thady Quirk hes about eighty years old and is telling the history of the owners of the Rackrent property.
The first third or so of the novel is a quick breezing through the stories of three owners, but then what seems to be the good part of the story is in the last twothirds with the story of Sir Condy Rackrent.
Each of these four owners so completely mismanages their estate that everything ends up being owned by, Bottom line: the book satirizes Irish landowners,
But, heres the REAL reason I think this story made it onto THE LIST, The book was written and ready for publishing just a few months before the Acts of Union, which united the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland.
Shortly before it was published, footnotes and a glossary written in the voice of an Englishman were added for political reasons, Basically, everyone was concerned that someone from Great Britain would read the book and think Irishmen were just as bad as they were made out to be in the book and oppose the imminent Parliamentary Acts.
And, it was the GLOSSARY that I enjoyed more so than the story itself, Because, it was actually kind of funny to learn some of the old Irish customs and traditions, So, I added an extra star to my rating just for that,
To say that this work caught me off guard is rather an understatement, One the one side you have the weight of theBooks Before You Die that made it possible for me to not only know of a work published by a women way back in theblue yonder, but to acquire a copy relatively painlessly in terms of both opportunity and price.
On the other is my prior experience with Edgeworth in the form of sitelinkBelinda, which was so much frustratingly wasted potential and bigotedly censored prose sprawled over more thanpages that I thanked whatever gods there are that Austen admired the writer without aping the writing.
So, when came time for another reading challenge involving seeking women authorship anywhere and everywhere and the cusp of theth century wasn't proving cooperative in terms of the books I had already added, I sighed, gave thanks for the extreme brevity of this particular work, and lined it up along the sights of my reading trajectory.
What I didn't exact was a piece that tells itself but tells it slant to such a degree that I have to thank the politics that colored the time of its composition, for while the "first historical novel" has its moments, it's the introduction, glossary, and footnotes, added last minute so as to not scare off the less staunch imperialists of England, that make this text rather extraordinary.
Not so extraordinary that I'm willing to rate it any higher than I do, but when it comes to the canon and the like, while I'm sure there's far more works by women floating in the ether of the turn of theth c.
, I'm glad that this one made it to us in relatively one piece,
Satire, satire, satire, Couple that with the phrase 'unreliable narrator', and you have some of the laziest writing uplifted to the highest of heights the world ever did see, You also have some of the greatest piece of texts to ever grace the senses and souls of that forsaken skullduggery of a spieces known as Homo sapien, which is why I continually find myself hurling myself willy nilly at many an uplifted representative and simply seeing what sticks and what does not.
Do I think Edgework succeeded as well as, say, sitelinkA Modest Proposal did and will forever do No, but it is worth noting the commonality of Ireland as subject of the two works.
For Ireland was one of the earliest testing grounds for the many headed beast of the English breed of colonialism, and certain folks who were either born and bred there or arrived to find that something was rotten in the state of God Bless the Queen discovered early on that one had to laugh or be forever doomed to cry.
And in my case, for whatever reason, Old Thady the narrator proved to be the star that aligned the text with its supplemental material: that introduction that simpered, those footnotes that capered around the unspeakables, and that glossary that knew exactly what misbegotten gore its violently nosy readers were looking for and blandly delivered up everythingthcenturycensorshipworthy in its place.
Edgeworth doesn't rise much above the politics of her time, but she does undermine certain complacencies enough to get the average reader thinking, and the whole work is rather ridiculously entertaining without overstaying its welcome that I have to give it more credit than I thought I'd be capable of doing.
Seeing as how I'm a number of years into my dedication to reading women of earlier decades and am in no way tired of the enterprise, I'll likely be returning to Edgeworth rather haphazardly, as I have with a number of other writers whose simple existence during certain periods draws the interest, if rather resignedly at times.
Still, reading this piece complicated my previous mental portrait of the author and her writing enough to leave me satisfied with the whole experience, although I won't deny that the whole thing being much shorter than the first time around had been made it that much easier to be content with it all.
In any case, I'm not going to recommend this to anyone, what with the uproarious antisemitism slung together with misogyny that forms the heart of certain major parts, but unlike the Wikipedia page for the work, I'm not going to quibble in a baffled manner over the piece proving influential when most readers least expected it.
In any case, when the style and the prose and the technique has been done to death by many an imitator and castigated by many a critic, there's a good chance that there will still be settler states in the world cultivating the same dynamics and suicidal impotencies that Edgeworth lampooned and likely would have lambasted otherwise.
Whether writers of those benighted times will look back and draw upon a certain satirical backbone involving anth c, English woman writer in Ireland in their own can'ttouchthis acrobatics of rhetoric and flair remains to be seen, .