In eighteenth-century Ireland, a privileged class of Anglo-Irish landowners known as the “Protestant Ascendancy” lived on great estates, with the mostly Catholic Irish as their tenants and servants.
Maria Edgeworthwas part of this Anglo-Irish aristocracy.Castle Rackrent, her best known novel, satirizes the failures and follies of her Anglo-Irish peers, their mismanagement of their estates, and their abuse of their Irish tenants.
The narrator ofCastle Rackrentis Thady Quirk, whose family has served on...
