Maria Edgeworth's The Double Disguise: Language Development, Experimentation, and the Importance of Juvenilia

Maria Edgeworth is well known for her didactic tales and her production of regionally accurate narratives. Much less is known, however, about her juvenilia and the influence this writing had on her adult work. In the following article, I examine numerous words identifiable in Maria Edgeworth's juvenilia drama, The Double Disguise (1786), which antedate the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) quotations attributed to her adult work. Through examining the similarities in word choices and vocabulary between The Double Disguise and her later work, this article argues for the importance of juvenilia on the development of Edgeworth's adult authorship.