The truth about women

When Jane Austen published her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, in 1811, there was no doubt who was the leading novelist of the day. Maria Edgeworth was not only the most widely admired writer of fiction in English but also the best remunerated. In a famous vindication of fiction in Northanger Abbey, Austen herself names Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) as one of those works that have proved the intellectual power and the wit of the best novels. Edgeworth kept a tally of her earnings, believing that copyright prices were the best measure of an author's standing: at the peak of her fame in 1814, the year in which Austen published Mansfield Park, Edgeworth received more than £2,000 for her novel Patronage – this in an age when £500 might be a good annual income for a professional gentleman with a family to support.

Her fame and earnings as a novelist would eventually be eclipsed by Sir Walter Scott, a rival who became a close friend. (Scott dubbed her "the Great Maria" and claimed that he had been inspired to compose Waverley by reading her fiction.) She remained the leading woman novelist of the early 19th century. And more than this, she was a literary celebrity: as well as Scott, she knew Wordsworth and Byron, Jeremy Bentham and Sir Humphry Davy. Those who know of Austen's rural anonymity might assume that this was the typical lot of the ambitious female writer at this time, but Edgeworth flourished as a woman of letters. Fluent in French, she was as renowned for her somewhat stern intelligence in the salons of Paris as she was in London literary circles. She was also a renowned educationalist, and it is surprising that her advocacy of women's education in works such as Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) has not helped to save her from her present obscurity.

As a young woman, Edgeworth was encouraged and much influenced by her father, the politician and self-styled intellectual Richard Lovell Edgeworth. He was friends with Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton, members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. She inherited her interest in education, a belief in progress and a cosmopolitan bookishness from her father, who had four wives and 22 children. He disapproved of novels as essentially frivolous.

Edgeworth's career as a novelist began with the hilarious Castle Rackrent, written in secret and published in 1800. Narrated by Thady Quirk, aged retainer of the Irish Rackrent family, it chronicles the misadventures of the clan, as each new head of the household finds different ways to run through its assets. Thady can see nothing but good in the eccentricities of the various drunkards, rakehells and spendthrifts he serves down the years. He was based, Edgeworth said, on her father's steward, whose voice the novel wonderfully brings to life. Over the two decades after this brilliant debut there followed a series of successful novels – some, like The Absentee, dramatising Anglo-Irish society; some, like Belinda, following the travails of young English ladies as they tried to choose the right husband. She also had a successful line in children's fiction of a somewhat moralistic cast.

Unlike Austen, Edgeworth lived into ripe old age. Helen was published when she was in her 60s and has both the polish of achievement and the energy of something experimental. Though it begins as if it were a novel of courtship, destined to end with the happy betrothal of its heroine, the orphaned Helen Stanley, it soon becomes something more audacious: the story of Helen's friend Lady Cecilia Clarendon, and the crumbling of her marriage. Helen is a novel about lying. Edgeworth was interested not in lies that are told in malice (though there are these, too, in the novel), but in the self-destructive lies a woman tells to those whom she loves. Charming Cecilia tells fibs, which are beguiling and harmless at first, but turn corrosive. Readers of Austen will recognise some things: the drawing-room jousts, the female rivalries, the comedy of manners. Yet Helen looks forward to later 19th-century novels of marital discontent or disaster.

It is a novel of two halves, the first a study of manners and conversations, the second an accelerating drama of marital distrust. The social milieu Edgeworth depicts is patrician. Helen, recently orphaned, finds herself living with Lord and Lady Davenant at their country house. Guests go hawking and sometimes talk in French. Edgeworth herself moved in high society in the 1820s and 30s and, though a radical in her youth, shows a respect for social standing. Politeness is so elegantly exercised that the reader warms to those vulgar enough to break its surface, such as Lady Bearcroft, whose blundering conversation often contains gems of satire. In the pressing silence of a formidably refined tea, to which various political potentates have been invited, it is she who wonderfully acknowledges the overwhelming awkwardness of the occasion. "Amazing entertaining we are! So many clever people got together too, for what?" It is a good question. A few moments later she finds herself laughing so much at the pained gravity of the other ladies' countenances that she has to run from the room. She uses deliciously incorrect words ("coggledy", "boggle-de-botch") with a happy sense of their incongruity: "When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms." Edgeworth, like her character, enjoys the disruption of elegance.

When the novel moves with its heroine to London in its second half, the mood shifts decisively. To the reader's (and evidently the novelist's) delight, London high society is nasty and scandal-addicted. The first metropolitan occasion is Lady Castlefort's party, where Helen and her suitor Beauclerc arrive as expectant guests to encounter a world of stage whispers and knowing glances. It is quite a baptism. Most of the women cluster to exchange detraction. In an inner room, Lady Katrine Hawksby stirs the cauldron of her malice with her scandal-mongering confidantes. The pattern is set. At a fashionable London picture sale, a story about the amorous provenance of a certain locket is told "for the amusement of the whole room" by "a party of fashionables". Though names are knowingly avoided, it is Cecilia who is being cheerfully defamed in front of her friend. This is a social world where calumny seems a sport, yet where proprieties are rigidly maintained. An intriguing sub-plot involves the efforts of the cunning Madame de St Cymon, a woman ostracised for some unspecified sexual misdemeanour, to win her way back into high society. She challenges disgrace by using her knowledge of Cecilia's past to blackmail her into communication. It is like a glimpse into a Henry James novel.

There is a good deal of conversation in the novel, because we have to judge people from how they talk. Sometimes you seem to hear the tone of worldly reflectiveness that Edgeworth must have taken from her own evenings in drawing rooms and salons. Conversation in her novels is a mannered art, and dialogue is studded with witty quotations and allusive put-downs. Edgeworth visited Paris in 1802 with her father, who had been a disciple of Rousseau, and she was much influenced by French urbanity. Several of the more cutting characters in her novel like to use French phrases for their barbs, notably the deliciously camp Horace Churchill, supposedly a possible suitor for Helen. He flourishes his French because he is always finding nice words for the cruel things that he wants to say. Discussing the mésalliance between a rich man and a vulgar, penniless woman, he explains that it is often necessary "mettre du fumier sur nos terres" – to put dung on our fields. All the most fashionable practices in London are "à la Française".

Edgeworth is mocking only a little. It is she as narrator who tells us that Cecilia's lady's maid Felicie has "a certain petite metaphysique de toilette": the elaborate phrase is suited to the character (French herself, naturally) but is also an authorial flourish. French stands for sophistication – but also the evasion of truthfulness that comes with it. Even the Francophile Horace finally regrets the sacrifices of candour he has made for his "reputation de salon". A character recently returned from Paris tells Helen that Parisians disapprove of blunt truthfulness as "bien Anglaise".

This story about untruthfulness turns on one question: can a woman love more than once? Before marrying, General Clarendon has asked Cecilia, his wife to be, "if she had ever loved any other man". Cecilia has taken it that only a firm "no" will win his hand, and has duly given the desired answer. We might remember the teenage Marianne in Austen's Sense and Sensibility, with her conviction that a person can only love once (even though she is the daughter of her father's second wife, and is destined to disprove her own absurd theory). Cecilia's assurance to her husband-to-be is an untruth, since she was once admired by the disreputable Colonel d'Aubigny and appeared (in letters, dangerously enough) to return his endearments. The error is small, we might think. Edgeworth took the idea for her novel from a verse tale by George Crabbe, "The Confidant", in which the young woman's error is altogether more grievous. Crabbe's Anna – the equivalent of Cecilia in his story – has had a love affair which has produced an illegitimate child. She must keep try to keep all this hidden from the man she loves and now wants to marry. Cecilia's secret is much smaller: a few indiscreet endearments in a couple of letters written long ago. Yet her husband's very rectitude invests the secret with huge significance. He must not find out. We watch Helen being recruited to her friend's deception, with Edgeworth exploiting her heroine's unselfishness and making it look like pliability.

Yet Cecilia is the one in danger, and Helen becomes the gripping story of how her lies take her marriage to the brink of destruction. The moralist in Edgeworth seeks to teach a lesson; the novelist in her is simply interested in the ramifying consequences of deceit. Through the third and last volume of the novel, the entanglements become ever more complicated and painful. The clever thing is to begin with an untruth for which the reader finds it easy to forgive Cecilia. Her utterly principled and therefore utterly daunting husband-to-be, with his countenance "rigid as iron", has terrified his wife into deception. The code by which he lives, and her own respect for it, may be foreign to us, but the dilemmas it produces are entirely credible. What disgrace might you suffer to save a dear friend from a worse disgrace? What lies would you not tell your husband to protect your marriage? Can you love a man you can so completely deceive? These are the questions that push the reader on to the novel's dénouement. Can it all possibly end happily?