Among the Yahoos: Edgeworth, the Irish Language, and the Letter from Connemara

Abstract: Maria Edgeworth's attitude toward the Irish language is often characterized as either hostile or indifferent but the reality was more nuanced. Edgeworth deemed the language a remnant of Ireland's barbaric past and reacted to it as a symbolic threat to her hybridic identity. As her career progressed, however, she slowly made space for an Irish-language subjectivity within her construction of Irishness, if in a strictly subordinate position. Yet when Edgeworth traveled into the wilds of Connemara in 1833, a region where the language still dominated, she was confronted by an Irish-speaking population that resisted her efforts at cultural containment.