'The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy' by Sarah Fielding is the first full-length novel written for children. As such and in itself, it is a significant work of 18th-century children's literature. The book is about a boarding school run by Mrs Teachum, and the story takes place over ten days, not including some initial background information and an epilogue. On each day except for the first, all or part of a text is read aloud to students by Miss Jenny Peace. Afterwards one or more of the pupils is physically described, followed by an account of their life story. These are written to appear as if spoken by each girl and recorded by Miss Jenny. Each session of reading is capped by an appearance from Mrs Teachum, who explains the lesson to be learnt from each experience. Emphasis is given to the importance of reading and to reflecting on the reading.

Researchers have neglected the cultural history of education and as a result women's educational works have been disparaged as narrowly didactic and redundant to the history of ideas. Mary Hilton's book serves as a corrective to these biases by culturally contextualising the popular educational writings of leading women moralists and activists including Sarah Fielding, Hester Mulso Chapone, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, Catharine Cappe, Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Marcet, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Carpenter, and Bertha von Marenholtz Bulow. Over a hundred-year period, from the rise of print culture in the mid-eighteenth century to the advent of the kindergarten movement in Britain in the mid-nineteenth, a variety of women intellectuals, from strikingly different ideological and theological milieux, supported, embellished, critiqued, and challenged contemporary public doctrines by positioning themselves as educators of the nation's young citizens. Of particular interest are their varying constructions of childhood expressed in a wide variety of published texts, including tales, treatises, explanatory handbooks, and collections of letters. By explicitly and consistently connecting the worlds of the schoolroom, the family, and the local parish to wider social, religious, scientific, and political issues, these women's educational texts were far more influential in the public realm than has been previously represented. Written deliberately to change the public mind, these texts spurred their many readers to action and reform.