Among the Yahoos: Edgeworth, the Irish Language, and the Letter from Connemara

Maria Edgeworth's attitude toward the Irish language is often characterized as either hostile or indifferent but the reality was more nuanced. Edgeworth deemed the language a remnant of Ireland's barbaric past and reacted to it as a symbolic threat to her hybridic identity. As her career progressed, however, she slowly made space for an Irish-language subjectivity within her construction of Irishness, if in a strictly subordinate position. Yet when Edgeworth traveled into the wilds of Connemara in 1833, a region where the language still dominated, she was confronted by an Irish-speaking population that resisted her efforts at cultural containment.