Maria Edgeworth was born in Black Bourton in Oxfordshire. The date has been traditionally given as 1 January 1767, but may have been one year later. She was the third child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth by the first of his four wives, and was to be closely associated with her father in his educational work and in bringing up many of his twenty-two children. Most of her childhood was spent in England, but in 1782 she accompanied her father, his third wife and a number of children to Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford.

Her father immediately set himself to improve the neglected Edgeworth estate and proved to be a progressive and humane landlord. He was also an inventor devising a telegraph, a velocipede, a perambulator for measuring land, a turnip-cutter and a railway to carry limestone. He took an active interest in his children's education, and Maria's first publication, Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), owed much to his ideas on women's education. It was followed by The Parent's Assistant (1796), a collection of children's stories, and their jointly written Practical Education (1798). More children's stories were published in 1801 as Early Lessons and Moral Tales.

Maria's first and best novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), was published anonymously. It achieved immediate success, and her name appeared on subsequent editions. The short novel describes the decline of a family of profligate landlords: Sir Patrick Rackrent drinks himself to death; the litigious Sir Murtagh bursts a blood vessel quarrelling with his wife; the absentee Sir Kit is killed in a duel; and Sir Condy dies after signing away his last claim to the estate. The story is told in dialect by the Rackrents' steward, 'honest Thady' Quirk, whose scheming son Jason becomes agent and finally owner of the estate. Castle Rackrent has been described as the first regional novel in English. It influenced French and Russian novelists, while Sir Walter Scott hoped in Waverley (1814) to 'emulate the admirable Irish portraits'.

Belinda (1801), a novel of manners describing a young woman's emergence into society, was admired by Jane Austen. It is notable for the portrait of Belinda's sponsor, Lady Delacour, apparently dying of cancer and as witty as she is dissipated. The Modern Griselda (1805) and Leonora (1806) are studies of marriage, the latter told through letters. By now a celebrated author, Maria Edgeworth then published a series of Tales of Fashionable Life, notably Ennui (1809) and The Absentee (1812), both of which treat the problems of landlordism in Ireland. In The Absentee the Clonbrony family are first seen in extravagant London society. Their son travels incognito to Ireland and discovers that they are being cheated by a corrupt agent, and the family return to Ireland to manage their estates.

Maria Edgeworth had collaborated with her father on Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), a collection of sometimes inadvertent humour. The two authors then visited Paris, where she turned down a marriage proposal from a Swedish diplomat. Her father also contributed to the writing of Ormond (1817), though he was near death. The novel, inferior only to Castle Rackrent among Maria Edgeworth's prolific output, describes the maturing of a wild but clever young Irishman exposed to English and French society. Most notable is the contrast drawn between the cousins O'Shane: the Catholic Cornelius or 'King Corny' living as a feudal Gaelic ruler on a remote island, and the scheming Ulick who has turned Protestant and joined the Anglo-Irish gentry. Two other long novels of this period, Patronage (1814) and Harrington (1817), were less successful.

Poor eyesight made Maria Edgeworth curtail her reading and writing for a period, and in 1826 she had to take over the management of the Edgeworthstown estate from her ineffectual brother Lovell. Ever the educator and moralist, she wrote several more improving stories for children, but the novel Helen (1834) was the only substantial achievement of her later years. Another novel of manners, it features a virtuous orphan whose happiness is threatened by a deceitful friend. Maria Edgeworth died at Edgeworthstown on 22 May 1849.

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