Castle Rackrent: A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Edition

Castle Rackrent chronicles the declining fortunes and ultimate ruin of the Rackrent family through the mishandling of their estate by a series of incompetent and irresponsible heirs.

Edgeworth attested in a letter she wrote years later that “the only character drawn from the life” in the novel is Thady Quirk (servant to the Rackrent family, and the novel’s narrator). But the novel as a whole is grounded in real events—the careless landlords and the “middle men who grind the face of the poor” described in Edgeworth’s fiction were very real in eighteenth-century Ireland.

This edition does more than any other to set this classic novel in the political, economic, and religious context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish life; in addition to an illuminating introduction, the edition includes a variety of background historical materials.