The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth
How a Nineteenth-Century Novelist Taught the World Economics
by Jeanna Smialek (Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor)
One aspect of the Enlightenment that does not get nearly enough credit is its prosociality. Weirdos have existed throughout history. It is from this social reserve that our terrorists, cult founders, and nonsensearians. But once – just once – a society made it cool for those folks to think about the abstract, and it gave us the actual future, not the cheap seats version the decidedly anti-Enlightenment captains of business try and pitch now.
There is a trickiness to reviewing this book. The book is a biography of Maria Edgeworth, a writer who was a contemporary of Jane Austin (and generally admired by Austin – Edgeworth’s feelings towards Austin were mixed. She wrote novels about economics, which sounds not thrilling, and I write that as someone with a favorable memories of the Henry Spearman novels.
I had not heard of Edgeworth before, but I will seek her out now, which is probably where I could stop the review. But the book is also not about her, and this is where it gets tricky.
I do not want to diminish the importance of the book in bringing Edgeworth back into the public consciousness, or the importance of her own story that is novel-like itself, (the author’s references to Bridgerton being a bit too precious). She was a woman novelist in a time where that was considered either unseemly or frivolous, interested in topics that were considered beyond the ken of the female brain, and probably played an outsized role in the transmission and maybe the development of those ideas.
This is worth keeping in mind when I mention that the thrill ride of this book is less Edgeworth in particular, and more the Enlightenment milieu that the author draws up. This is the literary equal to a Wes Anderson film, where intellectual luminaries and historical personages drop in for a scene. At the core is the inclusion of Edgeworth among these people, particularly the economists, and of those particularly Mathus and Ricardo. But she is not the only woman in the picture. She the only woman author in the picture. She is not the only woman author writing about economics in the picture.
For instance, one of the memorable but arguably extraneous bits is on how the conventional wisdom understanding of major early economics is wrong. The views of someone like Adam Smith are more sophisticated than the summary version. And the author’s position is how this Flanderization is calculated. What gets ignored or mistransmitted is there to serve specific political ends.
I love this aspect of the book, and telling the story of it from the perspective of one of the women involved is an excellent choice. One of the reoccurring problems in the study of history is the unforced error of conceding the state of play to the chodes of the world by, for instance, treating the Enlightenment as a single-note boys’ club that needs later rectification. It is women – or pick your marginalized identity – all the way down.
And even if you want to write all that of as excessively woke to protect your precious Western Way of Thinking, it is still a club, the eternal footnote to the Great Man theory. To riff on Stephen J. Gould, I am far less interested in what a person of singular intellect can accomplish and more about the margin of increase that rises out of that person being involved in a cohort of others, even if all lesser in some way.
There is a lot of this book that is just fun in terms of the stunning narrative of Edgeworth’s life that the author gets to retell. And it provides an equally stunning retrospective on the how of the intellectual process, that becomes a fun read in explaining the interior life of the Enlightenment thorough the specifics of one of its unheralded stars, her friendships and her work.
My thanks to the author, Jeanna Smialek, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, for making the ARC available to me.
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