The home education of girls in the eighteenth-century novel: ‘the pernicious effects of an improper education’

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between theories of domestic pedagogy as articulated in eighteenth-century conduct books, and fictional representations of home education in novels of the period. The fictional discussions of domestic pedagogy interrogate eighteenth-century assumptions about the innate superiority of a domestic education for women. In so doing, they participate in a much wider eighteenth-century and Regency-period debate about the proper role of women in public life. In order to make the argument that a woman’s education was vital to the public welfare of the nation, writers from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen shifted the grounds of the debate, making the previously private into a matter of public concern. Early eighteenth-century ideals of domestic education, which kept women firmly in the private sphere, therefore began to seem outdated.