Byron Called Her the 'Lion' of 1813. Maria Edgeworth Was Also Teaching Britain Economics

In the spring of 1813, Lord Byron dubbed Maria Edgeworth the "lion" of the London season — and gossip already questioned whether a woman could really have written her bestsellers. An excerpt from Jeanna Smialek's forthcoming book, The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth: How a Nineteenth-Century Novelist Taught the World Economics (Alfred A. Knopf, 2026), argues she was doing something more substantial than topping the literary charts: she was, arguably, the world's first female economist.

Edgeworth ranked among the most famous authors in the Western world. Her novels of Irish estates and London courtships were instant bestsellers, and they helped make the novel a respectable literary form. Jane Austen, far less feted at the time, wrote to her niece in 1814 that she had made up her mind "to like no Novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, Yours & my own."

What was hidden in the plots?

Readers came to books like Castle Rackrent, The Parent's Assistant and Ennui for wit and romance. They left, Smialek argues, with lessons in the brand-new field of political economy: tenant-landlord relationships, the benefits of educating workers. "Readers were learning economics accidentally from Maria's books, which were not advertised as lessons in the new science. She simply snuck it into the plots."

The claim rests on Edgeworth's own correspondence and the testimony of contemporaries. When Jane Marcet's Conversations on Political Economy appeared in 1816 — possibly the first true economics textbook, published while professors still taught from Adam Smith's 1776 Wealth of Nations — a character in it insisted that Edgeworth's nursery staple "The Cherry Orchard" contained "a simple and beautiful exposition of the division of labour."

Who was Jane Marcet?

A wealthy hostess whose circle included the economist David Ricardo and whose brother had become the youngest-ever director of the Bank of England, Marcet had courted the Edgeworth family since at least 1809, when she sent Richard Lovell Edgeworth her primer Conversations on Chemistry. In mid-May 1813 the Edgeworths attended her Russell Square dinner party, where the guests included Thomas Robert Malthus.

Edgeworth, under five feet tall and so quiet that Byron wrote "no one would have guessed she could write her name," found Malthus an "amiable, gentlemanlike man who really converses, that is, listens as well as talks." Sir James Mackintosh reported she was being "followed and courted by all persons of distinction in London with an avidity…almost without example," yet "remained perfectly unspoiled by the homage of the great."

Marcet slipped Edgeworth her manuscript before the family left London. Edgeworth sent back detailed notes. "The more amusing anecdote & illustration you can mix with your solid information the better," she advised. "It should be your object rather to sow seeds than to exhibit full grown plants — Your work should excite curiosity to go further." On Adam Smith: abridge him, because he "needs it much." On Jeremy Bentham: he was "absolutely impossible" to shorten, because what he needed was "to be diluted."

What does this change for the history of economics?

Marcet's Conversations stayed in classrooms for more than a generation and educated thousands, perhaps millions, in the field's basic ideas — gains from trade, the division of labor. Smialek's account adds the forgotten women back into a founding story usually told through Smith, Ricardo and Malthus alone. What the excerpt cannot yet show is how far Edgeworth's influence ran through the discipline's formal theory; for that, readers will need the book itself.