The shiftless Lord Glenthorn has money and a title but suffers from ennui—from boredom. When it is revealed to him that he is not, in fact, an Anglo-Irish earl, but the peasant Christy O’Donoghoe, he must face his changed circumstances in order to provide for a life and future for the woman with whom he has fallen in love.

First published in 1809, Ennui is a didactic novel by Maria Edgeworth, who, along with Jane Austen, was a preeminent female novelist of the early nineteenth century.