‘So she has been educated by a vulgar, silly, conceited French governess!’ Social anxieties, satirical portraits, and the eighteenth‐century French instructor

Abstract

Maria Edgeworth’s pedagogical short stories ‘Mademoiselle Panache’ (1800, 1801) and ‘The Good French Governess’ (1801) portray contrasting French instructors, and illustrate a transformation in English girls’ education in French at the end of the eighteenth century. While ‘Mademoiselle Panache’ looks back to the disingenuous French instructors of eighteenth‐century comedy, demonstrating English anxieties about the supposedly corrupting influence of the French on young girls, ‘The Good French Governess’ shows the positive influence of French émigrés in late eighteenth‐century French instruction. In contrast to critical assumptions that the English public’s outraged response to the French Revolution terminated English interest in all things French, these and other contemporary texts show that English girls’ education in French was not diminished by anti‐Jacobin attitudes, and indeed flourished into the nineteenth century.

Keywords:

• English literature
• modern languages
• social class
• girls
• teachers
• teacher training

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Carol Percy and UTEA/SSHRC for supervision and support, and to Melissa Walter and Gretchen Hitt for reading drafts.

Notes

1. I propose that Miss Paxton is the author of this text in ‘Identifying Jane Austen’s “boarding‐school” a proposed author for The Governess, or, the Boarding School Dissected’.