fiction was to make domesticity interesting, the women writers achieved recognition for
the children ‘discounted from history for centuries’ (Inglis 1981:83). The feminising of
fiction, started by Richardson two generations earlier, had provided an area in which the
scale and significance of childhood could be explored and acknowledged.
In her Original Stories from Real Life (1791) Mary Wollstonecraft places her two
motherless child heroines in the charge of a discerning relative who relates stories to
them to shape and improve their minds. She commented in a letter to her publisher: ‘If
parents attended to their children, I would not have written the stories.’ Drawing on
personal experience of revolutionary Paris and of oppression in England, Wollstonecraft
acknowledged children as characters; she also gave value to the depersonalised poor
and recognised the discounted nobility of their endurance.
Charles Lamb wrote for Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband, who himself
pseudonymously produced Fables Ancient and Modern (1805) under the name Edward
Baldwin. Lamb wrote the comic poem The Queen of Hearts (1805), Adventures of Ulysses
(1808) and Prince Dorus (1811); he may have written more for Godwin. Collaborating
with his sister Mary (1764–1847), he wrote six of the enduring Tales from Shakespeare
(1807); this work was commissioned by Godwin. Other shared works, Poetry for Children
and Mrs Leicester’s School appeared in 1809.
In all their work for children, the Lambs sought freedom from didacticism, writing with
an interest in a child’s perception and a child’s developing awareness: Arabella (Mrs
Leicester’s School) voyaging from the East Indies and befriended by the first mate
nicknamed Betsy, discusses the cruelty of harpooning and the power of nature while
observing the animated behaviour of creatures on board. The ship is not only a
miniature world, but an Ark which empowers the child through friendship. Many of the
child characters in this work are outsiders, exiles, bereaved or unchristened, observing
clear-sightedly the adult world into which they must be initiated. Mary Lamb’s Elizabeth,
having learnt her alphabet from the letters on her mother’s gravestone, tells her uncle
how Mama had taught her to spell.
Like Wollstonecraft and the Lambs, Maria Edgeworth deserves greater recognition for
her achievements in children’s literature. She emerges from the critics’ revisionist
scrutiny as skilled in using her father’s influence advantageously to promote feminist
views without offence, unlike Wollstonecraft. Praised by Yeats in 1891 as the most
‘finished and famous’ Irish novelist, she proves herself ‘a thorough mistress of...multiple
discursive practices’ (Myers 1992:139) in fiction for both adults and children. Writing at
first for her younger siblings and encouraged by her father, she produced the first
sociological fiction, employing the bildungsroman as a means to explore the ‘idealist
pattern of wish-formulation and wish-fulfilment that might be termed maternal romance’
(Myers 1992:140). She initiated not only the regional novel, but also the prototypes of
several related genres of American women’s writing, the female bildungsroman, and
narratives of manners and customs.
In 1796 she produced The Parent’s Assistant, tales drawing on the authentic detail of
observation and experience, while working on Castle Rackrent, her ‘memoir-novel’.
Although much of her work, for example Belinda (1801) seems female-centred, the
strongly masculine tone of Castle Rackrent (1800) has caused her to be described as the
least feminine of female novelists. The vibrantly individuated voices of her characters in
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