“The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth”: An Economist, Erased

About a decade ago, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about an aside from “The Worldly Philosophers,” Robert Heilbroner’s seminal history of modern economics. The book noted that one of the pioneers of the field had been friends with a woman named Maria Edgeworth.

“The daughter of an economist, she was perhaps the first woman to express opinions about the workings of the economy,” Heilbroner wrote.

I don’t know why such a minor point captured me. Maybe it was because the received history of economics was so devoid of women that it defied all reason: The standard account was all Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and then a long line of Jameses and Johns and Roberts. Maybe it was because I myself was a 25-year-old woman covering macroeconomics, a field that remained male-dominated and rife with sexism.

I looked up Edgeworth. She had been a famous Irish novelist at the turn of the 19th century, one so well-regarded that she drastically out-earned her contemporary Jane Austen. Sir Walter Scott was her pen pal and protégé. Lord Byron envied her. Ricardo and Malthus called her a close friend. This was all surprising. I was both a sucker for Regency novels and an economics correspondent, and yet I had never even come across Edgeworth’s name. Why, I wondered, had I never heard of this lady?

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/29/business/she-popularized-economics-then-she-was-erased-from-history-why.html