Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book

Arguing that the location of idealised maternity for women is in the act of writing educational discourse rather than in the physical performance of the maternal role, Davies plots the formation of a written paradigm of maternal education that associates maternity with educational authority. She examines a wide range of genres by authors that include Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.