Castle Rackrent

In eighteenth-century Ireland, a privileged class of Anglo-Irish landowners known as the "e;Protestant Ascendancy"e; lived on great estates, with the mostly Catholic Irish as their tenants and servants.Maria Edgeworth was 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 of Castle Rackrent is Thady Quirk, whose family has served on the Rackrent estate for generations. Thady relates the life stories of four successive lords of Castle Rackrent and how their individual character and personality affect the lives and families that depend on them.Castle Rackrent was one of the first historical novels written in English, and Walter Scott later cited it as inspiration for his own Scottish historical novels.Edgeworth included two sets of explanatory notes on aspects of Irish life and culture for her English readers, footnotes in the main text and a "e;glossary"e; added in the second edition. These have been merged into a single set of endnotes in this Standard Ebooks edition.Four generations of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family settle on their family estate in eighteenth-century Ireland.The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)