The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth: The Regency novelist who outsold Austen, and wrote the rules to a new era

Jeanna Smialek

Mar 2027 · Dorling Kindersley Ltd

About this ebook

Envied by Lord Byron, admired by Jane Austen, read avidly by the British royalty: this is the story of ‘The Great Maria’.

Maria Edgeworth, known to her contemporaries as 'the Great Maria', was one of the most important authors of the Regency era. Her work was the envy of Lord Byron, Humphry Davy and Walter Scott, and at the height of her powers she was outselling Jane Austen.

But she was far more than a novelist and a society fixture: she was also a covert economist, collaborating with David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus right at the dawn of modern economic thought. As the earliest theorists were establishing their philosophies on production and investment, Edgeworth was publishing dozens of stories with lessons on finance, society and trade tucked into their plots.

In The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth, journalist Jeanna Smialek tells Maria's story alongside those of the men — and women — who invented the field that would reshape our world. Through her fiction, Edgeworth delivered these new ideas to a broader public, stretching the boundaries of what a woman of her time could achieve and captivating an empire in the process.

Lively and original, The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth brings this astonishing woman and her world vividly to life.

About the author

Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief at The New York Times. She has covered economic policy in one way or another since 2013, and is the author of Limitless, a book on the history and future of the Federal Reserve. She has previously written for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek.