Adelaide and Theodore

Reviews / Votes

The following book review is from English, 2008, vol. 57 no. 218, pp. 199-208Perhaps through lack of exposure, many of these texts have not always received the acknowledgement and academic attention that they deserve. This belies the influence and significance that they had on their contemporaries, a circumstance that Jennie Batchelor, Megan Hiatt, and Gillian Dow seek to redress in these newly re-set editions of two much neglected eighteenth-century novels, The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760) and Adelaide and Theodore (1782). The editors' thorough referencing of contextual debates and works elucidate just how influential the texts were in their time. These two novels form part of a joint project between the library and the publishers, Pickering and Chatto, to produce 'scholarly editions' of some of the library's important and rare texts, making a selection of their more uncommon holdings available to a wider readership.The first novel to be published in the Chawton House series is The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House. This work, deserving of greater academic acknowledgement for the contributions it made to contemporary debates about women's agency in relation to virtue, economic security, and legal positioning, seems ripe for reclamation from obscurity.The second novel to be published in the Chawton House series is SteA phanie-FeA liciteA de Genlis's Adelaide and Theodore, or Letters on Education. This should be a fundamental text for anyone studying women's writing in the late eighteenth century, but particularly those interested in late eighteenth-century debates regarding women's position in education and parent-child relationships within the family unit.By making these fascinating and culturally relevant novels available to a wider readership, Chawton House and Pickering and Chatto have performed an invaluable service for readers interested in many different areas of eighteenth-century women's writing. Both will be particularly useful for those whose research encompasses female education, concepts of female virtue and understanding, marriage, parenthood, and sexual behaviour in the eighteenth century.