An old Irish steward narrates four generations of the family he served — the drunkard, the litigant, the absentee, the fool — in his own voice, without once noticing what he is describing. Edgeworth helped run her father's estate in County Longford and published this in 1800, the year of the Union; Scott said it taught him how to write a nation. It is the first regional novel in English. Fifty-eight plates after Gainsborough, Wilkie and others follow the Irish and English gentry through their estates and portraits, a fitting visual counterpart to Edgeworth's chronicle of four generations of one family.
