Meet economics’ missing female founder: the bestselling storybook author born 250 years ago
Fortune · Jeanna Smialek ·
Maria Edgeworth sold thousands of books, advised politicians, and informed the thinking of Malthus and Ricardo. Then she vanished from the story.
If you have learned even a little bit about the history of economics, you will likely know the names of its founding fathers: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus. But you almost certainly have not come across the women who founded the field alongside them, helping it to gain widespread popularity while advancing and altering its earliest theories.
Born in January 1768, Maria was the eldest daughter of the Anglo-Irish landowner Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his first wife, Anna Maria Elers. Maria’s mother died when she was five, leaving her under the care of her eccentric father—a law student turned philosopher turned gentleman farmer who would go on to have four wives, twenty-two children, and a lifelong interest in seemingly every idea the Scottish and English Enlightenments had to offer.
Maria spent much of her childhood in English boarding schools, learning how to be a high-society lady. But when she was fourteen, in 1782, her father moved her back to Edgeworthstown and made his eldest daughter his apprentice. Suddenly, instead of spending her days learning needlepoint and French in hushed drawing rooms, she dedicated them to accompanying Richard Lovell as he rode across muddy fields to meet tenants and to reading the likes of Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau under his tutelage. It was this unconventional upbringing that shaped Maria into a most unusual woman—and an early economist.