Anxious about his familyтАЩs fortunes, Colambre departs Cambridge for Ireland to assess his fatherтАЩs estates firsthand. There he finds his absent fatherтАЩs tenants sorely put upon by the estateтАЩs agent. Colambre races to stop his father from both destroying the lives of local peasants and throwing their family into ruins, but thereтАЩs one conditionтАФone heтАЩs sure will make his mother truly unhappy.
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Although born in England in 1768, Maria Edgeworth was raised in Ireland from a young age after the death of her mother. After nearly losing her sight at age fourteen, Edgeworth was tutored at home by her father, helping to run their estate and taking charge of her younger siblings. Over the course of her life she collaborated and published books with her father, and produced many more of her own adult and childrenтАЩs works, including such classics as Castle Rackrent, Patronage, Belinda, Ormond and The Absentee. Edgeworth spent her entire life on the family estate, but kept up friendships and correspondences with her contemporaries Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and her writing had a profound influence upon Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. Edgeworth was outspoken on the issues of poverty, womenтАЩs rights, and racial inequalities. During the beginnings of famine in Ireland, Edgeworth worked in relief and support of the sick and destitute. She died in 1849 at the age of 81.