‘What is fashionably termed ennui’: Maria Edgeworth Represents the Clinically Bored

Abstract

In 1809 Maria Edgeworth published her first three volumes of Tales of Fashionable Life, the first volume of which contained the novel Ennui. Edgeworth’s compilation of tales, which was extended by a further three volumes in 1812, exposed the vices of the fashionable world, from gambling to adultery. Edgeworth was capitalizing on the recent ‘commercial success’ of fashionable scandal novels such as Thomas Skinner Surr’s 1806 bestseller A Winter in London; or, Sketches of Fashion. As Anthony Mandal has observed, the ‘scandal fictions’ of novelists such as Surr, the pseudonymous Charles Sedley and ‘the enigmatic “Mr Lyttleton”’, alongside the ‘polite Evangelical tale’, dominated the literary market towards the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century and ‘sought voyeuristically to paint a lurid portrait of upper-class fashionable life, while paradoxically (and not quite convincingly) taking the moral high-ground’.