The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth, Fiction, Classics, Literary (Paperback)

Irish author Maria Edgeworth was one of the chief early practitioners of more modern novels in English, as well as being one of the pioneering Anglo-Irish authors. Born in 1867, one of her best-known novels is "Castle Rackrent" (1800), often considered to be a prototypical Gothic novel. In 1812, she published "The Absentee," a short novel that reflects the serious abuses of absentee British landlords in Ireland at the time. Another protest against this practice, of the same time period, that is perhaps better-known than Edgeworth's finely-written book is Swift's "A Modest Proposal," known to most high school and college students to this day as a well-reasoned justification for selling and cooking unwanted babies and children.