The eighty-second book: #1013 The Absentee - Maria Edgeworth
There are two sides to the Absentee. One is the by now known narrative of a family down on their luck through some fault of their own, having to deal with debtors and rebuild themselves, with shades of the author's earlier Castle Rackrent coming through - with a love story/scandal added in. That is mixed in with a commentary of Irish society some time after Great Britain took control. There's a lot of social commentary through the story, both on how the Irish nobility wants to align themselves with London and seem fashionable there, while draining the peasants working for them.
It's not quite that subtle about it, but it feels like the more interesting half of the novel, while the other side felt like a retreat with a slightly wondrous solution of the love story near the end. It's decent, but with Jane Austen around at this time, it fell flat for me.