Born in England of an Irish land-owning family, Maria Edgeworth began her career as amanuensis and co-author to her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the educator and amateur inventor. Her first publications were a series of moral tales for children (The Parents’ Assistant, 1796, and Early Lessons, 1802) which aimed to instil the virtues she saw as essential to a ‘good’ individual and so a ‘good’ society: honesty, frugality and hard work. These characteristics match rather precisely those of Adam Smith’s ‘prudent man’ in the Wealth of Nations. Her tales teach the value of a work ethic, sharply contrasting the evils of sloth and idleness with the pleasures of diligence and achievement. Indeed, her attitude towards this aspect of labour did not exclude her own privileged class of landowners, who, as she witnessed in her own country, frequently abused the landlord-tenant contract.

In 1800 she published the work which is, perhaps, of most interest to economists, Castle Rackrent. Through the character of Thady Quirk, an ancient retainer of the Rackrent family, she recounts the history of three generations of absentee landlords, of their tenants and of the depths to which the Rackrent fortunes had fallen through successive generations of dissolute lifestyle. The book not only influenced prominent literary figures of the time (for example, Turgenev and Walter Scott) but also established a literary precedent for the development of fictional characters within the context of a realistic historical, social and economic setting - an approach which, in England, could be said to reach its peak with George Eliot's Middlemarch. In the 19th century the name Rackrent came to stand for the embodiment of the vices of the landed aristocracy and was freely used as such by writers like Carlyle and, later, her nephew F. Y. Edgeworth.

Maria Edgeworth continued her critical examination of the landlord-tenant relationship in novels like The Absentee (1812) and Ennui (1825) where she addressed issues such as leases, population and economic progress and the impact of manufacture on a traditional agricultural economy. Her letters to David Ricardo confirm her interest in the poverty and distress among the Irish agricultural peasantry. She initiated and engaged in a vigorous correspondence with Ricardo over the potato question and the effects of famines in the 1820s. On this subject she differed with both Ricardo and Malthus arguing that the essential cause of the difficulty lay in mismanagement. She rather amusingly suggested that instead of theorizing from afar, Ricardo should travel to Ireland and see for himself.