Examining writing for and about education in the period from 1740 to 1820, Rebecca Davies’s book plots the formation of a written paradigm of maternal education that associates maternity with educational authority. Examining novels, fiction for children, conduct literature and educative and political tracts by Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Martin Taylor and Jane Austen, Davies identifies an authoritative feminine educational voice. She shows how the function of the discourse of maternal authority is modified in different genres, arguing that both the female writers and the fictional mothers adopt maternal authority and produce their own formulations of ideal educational methods. The location of idealised maternity for women, Davies proposes, is in the act of writing educational discourse rather than in the physical performance of the maternal role. Her book contextualizes the development of a written discourse of maternal education that emerged in the enlightenment period and explores the empowerment achieved by women writing within this discourse, albeit through a notion of authority that is circumscribed by the 'rules' of a discipline.

Describing the epistolary practices of the Dutch elite in the period 1770-1850, this book shows how cultural ideals of sincerity, individuality and naturalness influenced the style and contents of letters and argues for the vital importance of correspondence to the performance of class, gender and familial identities.

An interdisciplinary study of the 'domesticated' or home landscape as it shapes women's lives and their ways of writing.

This book is a major study of child readers and their reading habits in the period when children's literature first became established.

"Published in association with BSECS, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies"

Over the next fourteen years she wrote home to her mother, Julia Stone Towne; these letters and Julia's letters back to her - the only published collection of sustained correspondence between a nineteenth-century American mother and daughter - create a deep and rich world filled with the ideas, affection, advice, and comfort that each woman gave to the other.