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Jan. 21st, 2016 04:34 pmI started Maria Edgeworth’s *Practical Education* (1798) with a happy heart. The introduction offers a bold defence of women writing, which is great coming from a woman whom Austen admired and Walter Scott used as a role model.
She begins by jeering at Johnson’s pomposity and asserting that he misjudges women who write and inflates the worth of men who write. I find Johnson vastly over-rated and misogynistic – virtually the only thing I know about him is that he said a woman writing was like a bear dancing, one is amazed that it does it at all, although it is not done well – so I was cheering on Edgeworth.
However, she then lost me by arguing that most children’s literature is frivolously fantastical, with stories of giants and fairies. Instead, she proposed rational, moral tales aimed at developing the child’s vocabulary and moral growth. This made me dread reading her short story collection, and I was right. The stories were a collection of proto-Victorian, moralistic, twee insipidity.
Though apparently they were popular throughout the whole Victorian era, and were still being referenced as late as E Nesbit (who disliked them).
Modern critics appear to struggle with her overt morality, with many choosing to blame her father for his heavy editing of her work. She was the eldest of twenty one children and became her father’s off-sider. He was deeply involved in her education and advised on her writing in this collection and later when she was established as a major adult novelist. After his death she edited a collection of his life and letters, and then wrote very little else.
I would love to know more about her. To start with, the phrase ‘the eldest of twenty one children’ is one rarely uttered and I would like to know more. Her father remarried several times, once to his deceased wife’s sister which was considered rather risqué, especially as it came mere months after the first wife’s death. His last wife was virtually exactly the same age as Maria.
Maria never married and wouldn’t it just be fascinating to know more about why and what she thought of being a successful single woman. Did she feel like she had dodged the bullet of endless pregnancies and the risk of early death in childbirth? Did she define herself as brainy rather than an embodied creature? Did she feel she was a failure for not marrying? Did she, like Emma Wodehouse, feel that it was only demeaning to be a poor spinster and that a wealthy single woman was the happiest of people?
She also wrote a guide to practical education for young people, a subject which she presumably knew quite well as she lived in a house in which twenty younger siblings were educated. Some parts could be inserted directly into child care books today – the first chapter is about the need for toys which expand a child rather than having a single use only. However, her emphasis on raising children who are rational and unimaginative is probably not something you are likely to read today.
She was writing during the Enlightenment, so I guess her stress on raising scientifically educated and rational children has context. She recommends scientific experiments at home and notes the importance of any illustrations in children’s rooms being strictly realistic, including depicting animals to scale.
She also has chapters on the different values the parent might want to instil in their children – truthfulness being a key value. Part of me admires this – it’s a refreshing change from the emphasis in modern child care books on getting your child to excel in school. She argues that parents should not promote idleness by allowing their children to read adventure stories in which children run away and become famous soldiers or sailors. This will promote a love of excitement and detract from their willingness to work solidly at boring tasks. She notes that novels and biographies of this sort are less detrimental to girls who will inevitably realise that it would be impossible for them to undertake such ramblings.
This is another point at which I was taken aback. Edgeworth seems like a kind of proto-feminist foremother at times, and then, bam! she’s back in the 18th century. Which was, of course, her home.
In short, Edgeworth is definitely worth a read, and not just because she outsold Austen at the time (by a lot – she got thousands for her novels, where Austen got a hundred or so).
She begins by jeering at Johnson’s pomposity and asserting that he misjudges women who write and inflates the worth of men who write. I find Johnson vastly over-rated and misogynistic – virtually the only thing I know about him is that he said a woman writing was like a bear dancing, one is amazed that it does it at all, although it is not done well – so I was cheering on Edgeworth.
However, she then lost me by arguing that most children’s literature is frivolously fantastical, with stories of giants and fairies. Instead, she proposed rational, moral tales aimed at developing the child’s vocabulary and moral growth. This made me dread reading her short story collection, and I was right. The stories were a collection of proto-Victorian, moralistic, twee insipidity.
Though apparently they were popular throughout the whole Victorian era, and were still being referenced as late as E Nesbit (who disliked them).
Modern critics appear to struggle with her overt morality, with many choosing to blame her father for his heavy editing of her work. She was the eldest of twenty one children and became her father’s off-sider. He was deeply involved in her education and advised on her writing in this collection and later when she was established as a major adult novelist. After his death she edited a collection of his life and letters, and then wrote very little else.
I would love to know more about her. To start with, the phrase ‘the eldest of twenty one children’ is one rarely uttered and I would like to know more. Her father remarried several times, once to his deceased wife’s sister which was considered rather risqué, especially as it came mere months after the first wife’s death. His last wife was virtually exactly the same age as Maria.
Maria never married and wouldn’t it just be fascinating to know more about why and what she thought of being a successful single woman. Did she feel like she had dodged the bullet of endless pregnancies and the risk of early death in childbirth? Did she define herself as brainy rather than an embodied creature? Did she feel she was a failure for not marrying? Did she, like Emma Wodehouse, feel that it was only demeaning to be a poor spinster and that a wealthy single woman was the happiest of people?
She also wrote a guide to practical education for young people, a subject which she presumably knew quite well as she lived in a house in which twenty younger siblings were educated. Some parts could be inserted directly into child care books today – the first chapter is about the need for toys which expand a child rather than having a single use only. However, her emphasis on raising children who are rational and unimaginative is probably not something you are likely to read today.
She was writing during the Enlightenment, so I guess her stress on raising scientifically educated and rational children has context. She recommends scientific experiments at home and notes the importance of any illustrations in children’s rooms being strictly realistic, including depicting animals to scale.
She also has chapters on the different values the parent might want to instil in their children – truthfulness being a key value. Part of me admires this – it’s a refreshing change from the emphasis in modern child care books on getting your child to excel in school. She argues that parents should not promote idleness by allowing their children to read adventure stories in which children run away and become famous soldiers or sailors. This will promote a love of excitement and detract from their willingness to work solidly at boring tasks. She notes that novels and biographies of this sort are less detrimental to girls who will inevitably realise that it would be impossible for them to undertake such ramblings.
This is another point at which I was taken aback. Edgeworth seems like a kind of proto-feminist foremother at times, and then, bam! she’s back in the 18th century. Which was, of course, her home.
In short, Edgeworth is definitely worth a read, and not just because she outsold Austen at the time (by a lot – she got thousands for her novels, where Austen got a hundred or so).
