“small” England epitomizes the narrow geography we find throughout her novels. The correction of Elizabeth’s disposition is accompanied, in this view, by a contraction of space. While Austen marks out courtship as the appropriate subject for the novel as a genre, she simultaneously marks out the “midland counties” as its appropriate setting.3 The linkage of Elizabeth’s reformation to the generic and geographical scope of Austen’s particular brand of realism suggests the predicament of Irish fiction writers, since they hailed from a more distant place than one to which Mrs. Gardiner or anyone else in Austen’s novels would likely propose a tour. Although Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson did not conceive of a homogeneous English space as belonging particularly to Jane Austen, as provincial writers, they felt their distance from it acutely. This chapter focuses on the effects of provinciality for Edgeworth’s and Owenson’s Irish novels, which display an extraordinary self-consciousness about the unfamiliarity of their subject matter to their principal reading public, which, like Austen’s, was gathered around the London book trade.4
In Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1817) and Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), the two authors developed literary strategies to mitigate the effects of the distance between their subject and their audience, strategies that Austen, writing of her “small” England and exclusively addressing it, could do without. Such distance was compounded by long-held and virulent anti-Irish prejudice; to compensate for both, Edgeworth and Owenson use self-reflexive formal devises like the marriage plot, travel narrative, and paratexts to project an ideal relationship with English readers that downplays the otherwise vexed political intercourse between Ireland and England. For Edgeworth, this relationship takes shape in the realm of universalized moral codes grounded in the Scottish Enlightenment, while for Owenson, it forms within a more extreme fantasy that casts literary exchange as inhabiting an autonomous sphere of its own. Both of these projections—one harkening back to the eighteenth century, the other looking forward to the nineteenth—are developed through near-constant but inconsistent appeals to national character, which both sustain and trouble the ideal author-reader relationships their novels enact through narrative form. The complicated tensions and idealizations in Edgeworth and Owenson first shaped what this and the subsequent two chapters call the aesthetics of provinciality, a representational mode that ameliorates an author’s subordinate position in the literary field by projecting literary exchange into an exalted realm. The works of Edgeworth and Owenson, like those of Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper after them, do not inhabit this realm in reality—but it is an ideal to which their various literary experiments aspired.
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