Maria Edgeworth's role in Romantic women's writing has remained vexed. Her established relationships with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and author Thomas Day have led many scholars to overlook her as unsatisfyingly conservative in her feminism. At the same time, her perceived lack of relationships with other radical women writers, in particular, Mary Wollstonecraft, have led some critics to overlook her for similar reasons. Despite more recent general consensus among critics regarding the important role Edgeworth plays within late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's writing, critics remain divided as to its nature. Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace has argued that Edgeworth's identification with ‘masculine literary discourse … at best creates a female subject according to its own bias and interests’. Similarly, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli and Julia Douthwaite emphasize her intransigent conservatism. Cafarelli's indictment of Edgeworth as anti-feminist is scathing, arguing that her work ‘upholds an essentially conservative position, and indeed, the high copyright payments and the wide distribution of her novels of manners cannot be detached from their affirmation of the status quo. In her works … the wife is made entirely responsible for the success of the marriage and the happiness of the husband, as well as for driving him to and drawing him from the path of dissipation’ (p. 145). In contrast, Anne Mellor and Catherine Gallagher celebrate, respectively, how Edgeworth's educational writing asserts the equal rights of father and mother and male and female children. More recently, Catherine Toal has offered a sort of middle ground, suggesting we recognize how Edgeworth's writing focuses ‘instead on knowledge and skills useful for entry into an already constituted public or domestic sphere’.

However, re-examination of Edgeworth's Letters for Literary Ladies and its engagements with Day and Wollstonecraft demonstrate that Edgeworth rejected perceived essential associations between women and emotion or intellectual inferiority. Edgeworth's negotiation of the publishing world, her dialogue with both male and female authors, also demonstrates her rejection of arguments on behalf of women's education according to domestic utility. By organizing her intervention in the debate about women's education in letters and a satirical essay in which she assumes male and female voices for specifically male and female readers, she proves her ability, as a woman, to apply reason in defiance of stereotypes.