London society buzzed with one name that spring: Miss Edgeworth.
The year was 1813. The Regency era was at its height, and the upper echelons of society had gathered for the season in a delicate swirl of lace and silk, accompanied by calling cards and exclusive suppers. Although the Napoleonic Wars raged across Europe, social life managed to persist in all its lavish sparkle.
George III reigned; Queen Charlotte presided over her court. A renewed interest in antiquity had inspired the fashionable ladies of Mayfair and Marylebone to dress like modern versions of Cleopatra and Helen, with high waists and flowing skirts. Their gatherings mingled the rhetoric of neoclassical writers with the verses of Romantic poets.
Yet amid all the splendor and lively conversations, one socialite pursued a more serious purpose as the days lengthened and summer warmed. Jane Haldimand Marcet was determined to form a friendship with Maria Edgeworth, the woman whom the poet Lord Byron had dubbed the “lion” of the season.
“The Great Maria,” as she was sometimes called in literary circles, stood among the most renowned authors in the Western world. Maria was the eldest daughter of a Protestant English family who owned a vast estate in central Ireland. Her tales painted Irish estates, London courtships, and heroes who ranged from dashing to inept. They frequently became instant bestsellers—clever and popular at once, helping to elevate the novel’s standing as a respectable literary form. (Even Jane Austen, far less celebrated at the time, would in 1814 tell her niece that she had resolved to “like no novels really, but Miss Edgeworth’s, Yours & my own.”) Gossip already whispered about whether Maria authored her works herself, a question raised by the notion that such tales could come from a woman alone.
Maria Edgeworth was quietly tucking lessons on the brand-new field of political economy into her fiction and stories for children. In the process, she was educating an empire.
That quiet subversive edge was what Jane Marcet found so captivating about Maria’s fiction: she hid messages just beneath the surface. Readers flocked to Edgeworth’s books for their wit, their lively plots, and their lighthearted romances, yet they departed with insights about tenant-landlord relationships and the advantages of educating laborers. Maria Edgeworth was discreetly embedding the nascent study of political economy into her children’s tales. In doing so, she was, in effect, educating an empire.
Jane was eager to uncover how she accomplished that feat.
The host was one of many aristocratic Londoners keen to glimpse the season’s literary celebrity. Maria herself tended to live apart from society. For more than a decade, she had secluded herself in the library of the Edgeworths’ rural Irish estate, writing at a small wooden desk. She represented a novelty, and when news spread that she would join her father and stepmother on a rare trip to England, the great figures of the age lined up to greet her. The Edgeworth entourage had already visited with the Darwin family and the chemist Sir Humphry Davy. The politician and thinker Sir James Mackintosh wrote to a friend that the renowned author was being “followed and courted by all persons of distinction in London with an avidity… almost without example.” He added that she remained “perfectly unspoiled by the homage of the great.”
Fans swarmed around Maria wherever she went. “You would have laughed to see how eagerly people pressed in to catch a glimpse of Miss Edgeworth—who is very short—peering over shoulders and between curled locks to steal a look,” a companion later told Sir Walter Scott. Scott, a close friend of Maria’s, recorded that at a party where he met her, she admitted that the crowd had practically closed in on her.
Yet Jane had solid reasons to expect that the celebrated author would make time for a visit. She had been in touch with the Edgeworth family since at least 1809, when she had sent Maria’s father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a copy of her own debut, a chemistry primer titled Conversations on Chemistry. Jane had written the text to render the new science accessible to nonexperts, and she had consulted leading scholars to ensure accuracy. Richard Lovell, a celebrated inventor who had devised a primitive telegraph, who had nearly invented the steam engine, and who kept tinkering away on his rural estate, was a natural confidant for the project.
Even then, Jane carried a hidden motive. She had long hoped to forge a bond with Edgeworth’s eldest daughter. She made it clear in her letters that she was an admirer of Maria, urging the father to “thank Miss Edgeworth for the rational entertainment provided by her new tales” and insisting that she was “more than eager” to read more of Maria’s children’s stories. Maria, in turn, had read and admired Conversations on Chemistry. Her praise had likely traveled back to Jane, for the two shared many mutual friends.
Given their connections, it wasn’t hard to anticipate that the Edgeworth family would visit Mrs. Marcet’s fashionable Russell Square salon. It came as a lilac-scented surprise when, on a May evening, the famed Miss Edgeworth and her kin descended the Marcets’ steps, ready to attend one of Jane’s renowned dinners.
What did surprise them most, however, was the guest of honor herself.
Maria Edgeworth presented as a petite bundle of contradictions. Standing under five feet, she wore tidy but modest attire, and her demeanor was so unassuming that it challenged the awe surrounding her name. Her chin and nose were sharply defined, her skin pale, and her eyes expressive, yet they often drooped downward. An air of shyness radiated from her.
She had produced a string of fifteen years’ worth of literary hits, vigorously defended female education, and at times sharply critiqued the Anglo-Irish landlord class to which she belonged. She stretched boundaries to the point of controversy (one of her novels briefly contained an interracial romance, later removed at her father’s urging). Yet she spoke rarely, and when she spoke, it was in hushed tones. Lord Byron, who had met her at breakfast at Sir Humphry Davy’s only days before, wrote in his diary that “her conversation was as quiet as herself; no one would have guessed she could write her name.”
But even if Maria did not relish speaking, she loved observing. That is precisely what she did at Jane Marcet’s party, where she could quietly study the society’s top circles and listen to the era’s new ideas take shape. Mrs. Marcet’s guest list was a curated collection of intellects, including Thomas Robert Malthus, the economist who spent the previous decade arguing that population growth would outpace the food supply. The next morning, Maria dashed off a note to her sister (she quipped it was “before breakfast, at 1/2 pastry,” scribbled on eggshell stationery) detailing the evening’s conversations.
“Mrs. Marcet herself is plain, and has a disagreeable voice, but she is so sensible in conversation and unaffected,” she wrote. Malthus, she asserted, did not deserve the villainous reputation that clung to him. In her view, the economist was “amiable, gentlemanlike, who truly converses—listens as well as speaks, and follows others’ ideas as readily as he offers his own.”
The attendees would not have guessed that the ties forged that night would eventually influence the course of history. Maria would spend years engaging with Malthus, his circle, and ultimately his successor, shaping their thinking and informing their research. Even more critically, Maria and Jane would cultivate a long-lasting friendship that spanned decades and crossed borders. Together, they would propagate the ideas of the new discipline of classical economics—then called political economy—far and wide. Their collaboration would help the concepts of gains from trade and the division of labor take root in the popular imagination.
Because Jane’s aim extended beyond admiration. Edgeworth’s readers had already been exposed to economic concepts through novels like Castle Rackrent (the satirical tale of a bungling Irish landlord family), The Parent’s Assistant (a collection of instructive children’s stories), and Ennui (a lighthearted novel about a prosperous landowner’s self-indulgence). Jane’s objective was to push this approach further still.
Readers encountered economics by accident through Maria’s books, which were not marketed as instruction in the new science. She merely embedded it into the plots. Jane’s ambition, by contrast, was to be explicit, producing a manual for readers who approached the topic with intent. She had previously written Conversations on Chemistry to introduce scientific ideas to women and lay audiences. Now she sought to compose Conversations on Political Economy, and she needed Maria’s guidance to realize the project.
Readers were learning economics accidentally from Maria’s books, which were not advertised as lessons in the new science. She simply snuck it into the plots.
Jane would pass her new manuscript to Maria before the latter’s London departure that summer, seeking her counsel on both the prose and the substance. Jane benefited from a web of contacts in the field: her brother had recently become the youngest person ever named to direct the Bank of England, and the economist and financier David Ricardo was a frequent guest at her home. Yet Maria stood out as perhaps the only person in the world who had already presented a broad audience with an introduction to the infant field of political economy. To Jane, she was the master.
Maria appeared eager to mentor others who aspired to follow in her footsteps. She soon sent Jane an extended set of notes on the draft.
“The more entertaining anecdotes and illustrations you can weave with your solid information, the better,” Maria advised. “Your aim should be to sow seeds rather than to display fully grown plants—your work should spark curiosity to explore further.”
She also weighed in on the manuscript’s content. She suggested that Adam Smith needed to be shortened because he “needs it a great deal,” while Jeremy Bentham was “absolutely impossible” to distill; what he required was to be “diluted.” (This echoed a frequent refrain of Maria’s, who scoffed at obscure economic prose. One of her rare academic publications was an anonymous, favorable review of Bentham arguing that his books would be easier to understand if they were longer.)
Jane proceeded to publish her first edition of Conversations in 1816. The book framed the principles of economics through an imagined dialogue between two women, assembling the new science’s ideas in a way that had not been done before. It stands as perhaps the earliest true textbook on economics, published at a moment when tutors still relied on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) for instruction. The volume circulated in classrooms for more than a generation and eventually educated countless thousands—perhaps millions—on the basic notions of political economy.
Jane made a point of acknowledging that she was not the first to attempt to present economics in accessible terms. In the book, one character voices skepticism about whether women—or children—could learn political economy, a belief common at the time. The heroine insists that they already could, pointing to Edgeworth’s short story “The Cherry Orchard,” already a staple in English nurseries.
“The author has wisely avoided naming the science,” the character asserts. “But that little tale contains a simple and beautiful exposition of the division of labour.”
*
If you know even a little about the history of economics, you will recognize the names of its founding fathers: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus. Yet you are unlikely to have encountered the women who helped establish the field alongside them, elevating its profile while reshaping its earliest theories.
This book retells the history of the early years of political economy, a time before the discipline had solidified into a defined science, during which a small circle of privileged thinkers pursued its truths through philosophy, poetry, and literature. It restores the field’s overlooked figures and centers on the life of Maria Edgeworth, a remarkably fascinating person who, as you will see, may be considered the world’s first female economist.
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From The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth: How a Nineteenth-Century Novelist Taught the World Economics by Jeanna Smialek. Copyright © 2026 by Jeanna Smialek. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
