Maria Edgeworth sneaked economic theory into her best-selling novels

From the article:

About a decade ago, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about an aside from “The Worldly Philosophers,” Robert Heilbroner’s seminal history of modern economics. The book noted that one of the pioneers of the field had been friends with a woman named Maria Edgeworth.

“The daughter of an economist, she was perhaps the first woman to express opinions about the workings of the economy,” Heilbroner wrote.

[...]

I looked up Edgeworth. She had been a famous Irish novelist at the turn of the 19th century, one so well-regarded that she drastically out-earned her contemporary Jane Austen. Sir Walter Scott was her pen pal and protégé. Lord Byron envied her. Ricardo and Malthus called her a close friend. This was all surprising. I was both a sucker for Regency novels and an economics correspondent, and yet I had never even come across Edgeworth’s name. Why, I wondered, had I never heard of this lady?

[...]

I wondered if anyone else had noticed. A search through academic journals showed that a specialized few had clocked Edgeworth’s contribution. The economic historian William Henderson once called “Castle Rackrent” a “literary extension” of Smith’s work, arguing that it had “extended the influence” of early economics by inspiring other writers to apply its theories to the social sphere. Other academics, including Susan Manly at the University of St. Andrews, had also written about Edgeworth’s heavy use of economics.

I ordered and read other Edgeworth books, many of which featured barely concealed lessons in early political economy. “Letters for Literary Ladies,” Edgeworth’s first full-length work, published in 1795, makes a case for including women in the intellectual sphere. In it, she applies Smith’s criticisms of monopoly to the gendered labor market. Edgeworth draws parallels to examples from “The Wealth of Nations” to argue that men were holding back the economy of ideas by locking women out of literature and academics — a kind of protectionism.

[...]

“Ennui,” Edgeworth’s 1809 book about a hapless English-Irish landlord, further built on Smith’s and Malthus’s ideas to argue for broad education and free trade, and to riff on the conditions needed for lasting economic development. Edgeworth’s writing for children were full of tales about gains from trade and the division of labor.

[...]

I had dedicated that day to an unpublished essay on education, one that Edgeworth and her father seemed to have written together around 1800. As I worked my way through the hand-sewn notebook, I had a realization. This wasn’t just a piece of persuasive writing. It was a manifesto. It explained exactly what Edgeworth was trying to do, and why she was doing it.

The essay pushes for educating the poor and middle classes as a way to promote upward mobility and to make their members better voting citizens. These were big concerns at the time, when modern representative democracy was young and factories were just beginning to spring up. Edgeworth wrote, “The most certain and safe method of relieving the wretchedness of the poor & of increasing their share of the pleasures of life is to educate them.”

In particular, the essay makes the case for teaching the lower classes the basic principles of political economy, which have broad application to daily life and which might guide people toward pursuing their own interests while serving the greater good. Roughly a quarter century after the publication of Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” economics was the rage in the Enlightenment circles in which Edgeworth and her father, an inventor, traveled.

There was, however, an obvious barrier to bringing avant-garde philosophical and scientific ideas to the masses. They could be complicated and difficult to understand. The Edgeworth pair noted that it could be useful “to mix some political & commercial knowledge with fictions that amuse the fancy.” In fact, this was something Edgeworth had already begun to do.

Edgeworth was embarking on a project that was larger than her own oeuvre. She began to coach other literary women on how to include economics in their work. She struck up a close friendship with Jane Marcet, a London socialite who had already written a primer on chemistry, and the two women corresponded about economic topics. When Marcet wrote what could be considered the first textbook on economics, Edgeworth gave her extensive notes on the rough draft.

Edgeworth was as skilled an editor as she was a writer. She told Marcet that Adam Smith ought to be abridged, because he “needs it much,” whereas the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham was “absolutely impossible” to put in fewer words, because what he needed was “to be diluted.”

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Edgeworth’s project — to spread economics beyond elite circles in Edinburgh and London — worked.

Her books and stories were read by the literate classes around the world, in English and in French. King George III reportedly said “I know something now of my Irish subjects” after reading “Castle Rackrent.” Generations of children, including Queen Victoria, would be reared on the educational texts that Edgeworth wrote with her father. (At age 10, Victoria even wrote a story mimicking Edgeworth, titled “Sophia and Adolphus: In the Style of Miss Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy.”) As an empire’s worth of readers imbibed her stories, they also drank of the lessons they contained.

“Owing to the great popularity” of her work, Edgeworth had exerted “considerable influence on the attitude of thought in England regarding economic questions,” wrote Clara Elizabeth Collet in one of the earliest histories of economics, published in the 1890s. (Collet was a friend of Karl Marx’s family who was among the first women to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in England.)

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Political economics was seen as an extremely male pursuit, and cloaking it in stories made it both more digestible and more socially acceptable. Yet even the disguise of fiction was not enough to save those early female economic writers from eventual censure.

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As the field professionalized, the second- and third-generation economists distanced themselves from the women and the fiction that had once helped to popularize and explain their ideas. Serious science, after all, could not possibly be for everyone. The economist Alfred Marshall referred to the women who tried to simplify economic doctrine as “parasites” in a footnote to his hugely influential textbook, “Principles of Economics,” first published in 1890 and popular throughout the 1900s.

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In that derision lies the answer, at least in part, to my second mystery. Edgeworth did not go missing from our histories by accident. Her literature was lost partly because of its clunkiness — its economics lessons made it harder to digest as lighter and more naturalistic stories became the style.

Her economics was lost for a different reason. Subsequent influential academics disparaged the ways that the early women of economics had presented the field. They bristled at being simplified, and they dismissed the idea that the women could have contributed something meaningful.

From Wikipedia:

Castle Rackrent is sometimes regarded as the first historical novel, the first regional novel in English, the first Anglo-Irish novel, the first Big House novel, and the first saga novel. William Butler Yeats pronounced Castle Rackrent "one of the most inspired chronicles written in English". Sir Walter Scott, who met and carried on a correspondence with Edgeworth, credited her novel for inspiring him to write his Waverley series of novels[.]