Early in the first season of “Downton Abbey,” Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) tells Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) that “My life makes me angry.” Lady Edith is never as openly outraged about potential threats to her privileges the way Mary is, nor quite as explicitly political as her younger sister, the late Sybil Branson (Jessica Brown Findlay). But as becomes clear over the course of the series, Edith’s early bitterness and jealousy are the fruit of the same seed, the same circumscribed role and expectations for what her life might consist of.

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It’s not unfair to Edith to say that she entered the series as an unhappy and sometimes unpleasant person. But it’s also obvious that she is trapped in an unpleasant cycle within her own family. “You musn’t be unkind to Edith. She has fewer advantages than you,” Edith’s mother, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern), tells Mary early in the first season. “Fewer? She has none at all,” Mary replies smugly. In another episode, Cora tells her husband, Robert (Hugh Bonneville), “I fear Edith will be the one to care for us in our old age.” Though just moments ago, Robert had been saying that Edith deserved more consideration from her parents, he, too, can’t resist a nasty crack, telling Cora: “What a ghastly thought.”

Under these circumstances, is it any surprise that in the early seasons of “Downton Abbey,” Edith spends so much time, and causes so much embarrassment, trying to prove everyone wrong by succeeding within the narrow terms she has been allowed to inhabit. Whether she’s throwing herself first at Matthew and later at Sir Anthony Strallan (Robert Bathurst), Edith is trying to prove that she’s just as attractive and valuable as Mary. In the lead-up to her first wedding day, when Edith declares “Something happening in this house is finally about me,” the sentiment is both bratty and a little heartbreaking. If Edith’s a pest, it’s because the way she’s been told to live her life is pestilential.

By this final season of “Downton Abbey,” Edith has become an engaged and engaging person; someone whose work gives her something to think about other than herself and her position in her family; and a worthy romantic heroine. And she has been able to become a very different person thanks to the events that might well have ruined her life.

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When Anthony jilts Edith at the altar, he shatters her heart, but he also frees her from her unwise plan to devote herself entirely to his care. At the time, Edith can’t see it; in despair, she tells Anna (Joanne Froggatt) that the only thing Anna could possibly get her is “A different life,” expecting that such a thing is impossible. But if she had married Anthony, Edith would have locked herself into the sort of staid, limited existence that made her so miserable as a single woman; even her tradition-bound grandmother (Maggie Smith) is wise enough to advise Edith to “Let him go.”

Similarly, when Edith finds love again, the disappearance — later to be confirmed as the death — of Michael Gregson (Charles Edwards) seems like a disaster. But while Edith might have been very happy with Michael, his murder while in Germany leaves Edith with two things that change her life forever, though at first only one of them seems like an opportunity.

When Michael leaves Edith his London apartment, the magazine that was their point of introduction, and his fortune, he guarantees her not just financial independence, but responsibility that keeps her occupied and draws her out into the world beyond Downton. As Matthew’s mother, Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton), noted when Anthony jilted Edith, the best way to help Edith would be to “find her something to do.”

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And Edith’s pregnancy does for her what Mary’s premarital tryst with Kemal Pamuk (Theo James) did for her. Mary had to disclose the fact that she wasn’t a virgin to Matthew before they were married, opening up space for Mary to talk honestly about sex and desire that would serve her well for the rest of the series. And Edith’s love for her daughter Marigold initially seems as though it will provoke a scandal, but instead, pushes her to live with greater honesty and integrity.