The Absentee (Annotated)

Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812) is a incisive social novel examining Anglo-Irish landlordism, fashionable London society, and the moral consequences of estrangement from one's estate and tenants. Centered on Lord Colambre's education in judgment, the novel combines courtship plot, satire, and reformist realism. Its lucid, ironic prose belongs to the tradition of eighteenth-century moral fict...