Adelaide and Theodore, Or, Letters on Education (1783)

Book excerpt: Published in 1783, this translation was hugely popular in late eighteenth-century Britain. It was read as a system of education by authors such as Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and Clara Reeve, and is mentioned at the end of Jane Austen's Emma. Some of the theories Genlis adopts in the education of the eponymous children have their roots in Rousseau's Emile. However, Genlis herself suggested that Rousseau knew little of the practical education of children, and she endeavors to rectify this in her own novel, focusing particularly on the education of the female child, Adelaide. This important and influential work can therefore be placed within the context of the late eighteenth-century debate on female education.