Maria Edgeworth’s The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock : Symbolic Unification, Women’s Education, and the Marriage Plot

This essay reads one of Maria Edgeworth’s short plays, The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock (1817) as an Irish national tale with a pedagogical, feminist twist. Edgeworth engages with female education and authority, as well as the plot device of symbolically unifying marriage. The play responds to a variety of literary contexts, including Joanna Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse” (1798), closet drama, Edgeworth’s own educational theory, and popular national fictions such as Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806). Edgeworth’s portrayal of educated female leadership creates a protagonist whose authority and capability exceeds those typical of national tale heroines such as Owenson’s Glorvina. In this little-read play, she simultaneously calls those heroines’ positions into question while also capitulating to other tropes about women’s roles, as well as stereotypes of Irish and Scottish national characteristics.