Leonora (Annotated)

Maria Edgeworth's Leonora (1806) is an epistolary novel that stages a penetrating contest between sensibility, reason, and moral self-command. Through letters that reveal the tensions within marriage, friendship, and fashionable society, Edgeworth examines the seductive dangers of sentimental excess, embodied in the brilliant but unstable Olivia, and contrasts them with Leonora's disciplined virtu...