Leaving behind the Gothic realms of Radcliffe's novels, this chapter investigates how Maria Edgeworth uses visuality in her fiction to show the ways in which costume, jewellery, cosmetics and masks become extensions of, if not replacements for, women's innermost selves. As a discerning critic of turnof- the- nineteenth- century society who was intimately acquainted with Irish life, Edgeworth warns the reader that myopia exists on gendered, moral and cultural levels. Her fictional women frequently denature their subjectivity and selfhood in order to meet the male gaze. They are shown to endure the agonies of concealment and to be engaged in a theatrical performance of feminine roles for the benefit of male spectators who do not suspect or acknowledge the inner misery behind the ‘painting’.

By combining male and female perspectives into what Marilyn Butler calls ‘pseudo- journalistic’ prose, Edgeworth circumvents the strictures of ‘social acceptability’ and ‘moral appropriateness’ on the female observer. In Letters for Literary Ladies (1798), the novelist identifies the limitations on vision that thwarted women's pursuit of knowledge, stating that ‘we see things as they are; but women must always see things through a veil, or cease to be women’. Her preoccupation with the seen and the unseen situates her novelistic concerns in line with those found in Radcliffe's oeuvre. Rather than inspiring terror and concentrating on correlatives of character exterior to the self, Edgeworth's visual technique shows that those who learn to see with ‘connoisseur eyes’ and become ‘acute observers of human affairs’ can distinguish le vrai woman from her vraisemblable masks.

After considering Edgeworth's visual technique in relation to thematic concerns in contemporary reviews and recent scholarship, the chapter explores the visible and invisible binary of self- invention, or the relationship between representation and perception, in her plots. The analysis focuses on Castle Rackrent (1800), Ennui (1809) and Belinda (1801) in order to show that the theatrical ‘making up’ of her women's characters occurs on material, perceptual and pictorial levels.