International Colloquium, Friday 13 & Saturday 14 June 2025
Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
Confirmed keynote speaker: Gillian Dow
(University of Southampton)
We are now in a magnificent hotel in a fine square
formerly called “Place de Louis Quinze” –
afterwards “Place de la Révolution” – and now
“Place de la Concorde”. In this square the guillotine
was once at work night and day. Here Louis Seize
and Marie Antoinette died! … On one side of this
square are Les champs élysées; where the famous
courtisanne de l’ancien régime drove her triumphal
car with horses shod with silver. What a mixture of
things in this best of all possible worlds! Voltaire
represented Paris by an image made of mud
interspersed with precious stones. As far as I have
seen this seems to be not only an ingenious but a
just emblem… [Maria Edgeworth, 20 October 1802]
Background
The Irish novelist and educationalist Maria Edgeworth spent an intense five months in Paris from October 1802 until March 1803, travelling there from Ireland with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, an inventor and man of science who had assisted with a river engineering project at Lyon in the 1770s and who was already connected with French scientists, inventors, and intellectuals. The Edgeworths were preparing to settle in Paris for an indefinite period when Napoleon’s Consulate issued an expulsion order, partly based on their shared surname with the Abbé Edgeworth, who had administered the last rites to Louis XVI on the scaffold. Lovell Edgeworth, Maria’s brother, was subsequently interned at Verdun until 1814.
Paris was pivotal for Maria Edgeworth. It was here that she first found herself a literary celebrity in the wake of Practical Education (1798) and Belinda (1801), both of which had been translated into French. She associated with the Swiss-French Delessert circle; with André Morellet, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard, Adélaide and Claude Emmanuel de Pastoret, and Marc-Auguste Pictet; met the Benthamite jurist, Etienne Dumont, and received a surprise offer of marriage from the Swedish scientist and diplomat Abram Niclas Clewberg Edelcrantz. She went to the theatre and to salons, and discussed theories of language, Napoleonic politics, literature, science, and economics. A long and vivid letter written as she began her journey back to Ireland describes her feelings at meeting Madame de Genlis, whose Adèle et Théodore she had translated into English as a girl of fifteen.
The 1802-3 sojourn was personally, intellectually and politically significant for Edgeworth’s subsequent writing. Her personal crisis over the proposal of marriage from Edelcrantz, for example, merged with her intellectual response to Cambacérès’ new laws governing marriage and divorce. Her subsequent novel, Leonora (1806), bears the imprint of early Napoleonic-era sexual politics. The connections that Edgeworth made during her Paris visit continued to be important to her for the next twenty-five years of her writing career.
Colloquium
This colloquium will focus on Maria Edgeworth and her family, and especially on their stay in Paris in 1802-3, so we particularly welcome papers relating to Edgeworth herself; but we envisage a wider remit. As a writer and thinker, Edgeworth’s imagination and analytical powers were deeply engaged with the ideas flowing between France, Switzerland, England, Ireland, and the Scandinavian and Nordic countries. After 1803, Edgeworth read voraciously in Francophone literature; her works were translated into French, Spanish and Italian, among other languages, and her educational thought and writings for children gained influence across Europe. This transcultural presence and engagement makes her a figure with whom we can think productively about transnational networks of ideas. Edgeworth’s contact with various salonnières also allows us to reflect on the involvement of female thinkers in the supposedly masculine worlds of politics and law-making. Edgeworth’s fascination with Staël and other French writers stimulates explorations of the ways in which literature permits the adoption and adaptation of imaginaries across national borders.
We invite proposals for 25-minute papers focusing on Maria Edgeworth in Paris and/or on the related fields of enquiry outlined here. We are also open to proposals for papers centring on writers other than Edgeworth which amplify our sense of the individuals, networks, and influences which she could have encountered in France in the period of the Peace of Amiens and beyond.
Please send paper proposals (c. 200 words) to: edgeworth-in-paris@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr by the deadline of 1 October 2024.
Website: https://edgeworth-paris2025.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/
Organising committee:
Isabelle Bour, Sorbonne Nouvelle
Claire Boulard-Jouslin, Sorbonne Nouvelle
Susan Manly, St Andrews, UK