Lord and Lady Clonbrony live in London, spending the rents of an Irish estate they have not seen in years, while their agent squeezes it — and their son goes over incognito to look. Edgeworth helped run her father's estate in County Longford and put what she learned into Castle Rackrent; this 1812 novel is the sharpest thing written about absentee landlordism by someone who was on the landlords' side of it. Thirty-six plates after Lawrence, Gainsborough and others follow the novel's course from London interiors to open landscape, matching its movement from drawing-room debt to the Irish land itself.
