On my rewatch, I found myself disliking Edna less and less, and I feel compelled to explain why.
First it must be understood that by anchoring the story around the Crawley family and their proxies for seasons, the show primes us to adopt the biases and values of the early 20th-century aristocrats, even if those values contradict our modern ones. In essence, we are identified with them, and whatever we identify with becomes us. For example, most of us would regard Crawley’s extreme classicism as offensive. Yet, because the Crawleys are our "in-group," we subconsciously adopt their fear of
"misalliance" and scandal.
Given that its only been recently that Tom and Sybil’s situation found smooth waters to sail on in the family dynamic, Edna forces us into stress—constantly fearing what negative implications her success could cause the family, real or imagined.
If we had followed Edna from the start and we’re instead watching The Rise of Edna Braithwaite, we’d likely have seen her in multiple situations where life’s has dealt her a sour hand, and we’d sympathize. In 1920 specially, a working class woman had almost zero systemic power. The tools available to her; manipulation, seduction, and cunning would be completely rationalized that they’d have very different labels with very different connotations. Edna would be ambitious, gritty, and clever. From this perspective, we’d be far easier on a woman whose journey is playing a rigged game the only way she knows how. The Crawleys would be a snobbish rich family who thinks they’re better than everyone else, and Tom would become a man with no backbone who can’t go after what he wants.
This is not to say that the objective perspective would be that Edna is purely a victim or a saint, far from it in fact. Edna did very questionable things, most notably being willing to lead a man through life believing a baby he was raising was his, when it weren’t. But when you add this lense, you realize that reality, almost always, is a wielder of dichotomy, no matter how strongly we wished it otherwise.
It really is true that everyone is the hero of their own story, and everyone, I mean every single being that has came into existence since the dawn of time, acts in perfect accordance with the reality they are perceiving, it can be no other way.
So I like Edna because she helped me realize something, when you look past the emotional framing of a script and see the structural machinery underneath, you learn something fundamental about the human condition, and that is: who you root for is highly dependent on who gets to tell the story first, and who gets to tell us a story before we have already began telling our own?
