Maria Edgeworth to feature on Sandi Toxvig travel programme
Earlier this year the broadcaster and TV presenter Sandi Toksvig travelled around Ireland filming a travel series for More 4.
She visited places all around Ireland telling the stories of writers including Yeats, Swift, Heaney, Kavanagh and Maria Edgeworth.
The programme will be broadcast on Thursday September 3.
Toksvig’s travels took her to the Maria Edgeworth Visitor Centre and Museum, where she met Dr Susan Manly of St Andrew’s University, an expert on Maria Edgeworth.
On her visit Toksvig remarked: “I am ashamed to say I’d never heard of Maria Edgeworth until making this show, but she was the writer Jane Austen aspired to be.
“I think Maria’s problem is that she didn’t get into the movie business.”
The staff at the Maria Edgeworth Centre are delighted that the legacy of a great female writer will be remembered in the show and are hopeful that the exposure to a large audience in Britain will attract more visitors to Longford.
Also, soon to be published is a new biography on Maria Edgeworth titled ‘The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth – How a Nineteenth Century Novelist Taught the World Economics’.
The biography is by the bureau chief of the New York Times Jeanna Smialek and will be launched on October 5 in Europe and the USA.
Having read an advance copy of the book, Matt Farrell manager of the Maria Edgeworth Visitor Centre, said: “It is a wonderful read and captures the depth of Maria Edgeworth’s work.
“The last sentence in the book sums it up very well, ‘We may have forgotten Maria Edgeworth but we live in a world she shaped’.”
Matt said he has been waiting for a long time for someone to come along and pay homage to Maria Edgeworth and “Jeanna has certainly done that in her brilliant publication”.