Helen (Annotated)

Maria Edgeworth's Helen (1834), her final novel, is a polished work of domestic and moral realism, centred on Helen Stanley's entrance into fashionable society and her testing encounters with secrecy, vanity, and social compromise. Written in Edgeworth's characteristically lucid, rational prose, the novel refines the eighteenth-century conduct narrative into a subtler study of conscience and conve...