Edgeworth begins by commenting that the current taste for “anecdote” about common people, as opposed to the history of heroes, is a positive phenomenon (1). She surmises that “the heroes of history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian […] that few have sufficient taste, wickedness or heroism, to sympathise with in their fate” (1).

She claims that through small incidents such as “careless conversations […] [and] half finished sentences […] we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover” the “real characters” of our subjects (1). She says that we are right to focus on the lives of even “the worthless and insignificant” because it is by comparing their happiness or misery in relation to their livelihoods that we can better estimate their virtue or vice (1).

In regard to style, the biographer ought to write a “plain unvarnished tale” so that his literariness does not mar the authenticity of his narrative or cause deception (2). She then goes on to describe how her work was taken from the mouth of “an illiterate old steward” who was partial and familiar with the Rackrent family (3).