Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/100

84 rational training of their intellectual powers, women can be prepared at one and the same time to meet any emergencies of fortune and to fulfil the duties of wife and mother, and demonstrates that good mental discipline, instead of interfering with feminine occupations, increases a woman's fitness for them.

The next work Mary published was a volume called Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations calculated to regulate the Affections and form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. This was written while her experience as school-mistress and governess was still fresh in her memory. As she explained in the preface, her object was to make up, in some measure, for the defective education or moral training which, as a rule, children in those days received from their parents.

In addressing a youthful audience, Mary was as deeply inspired by her love of goodness, per se, and her detestation of conventional conceptions of virtue, as she was afterwards in appealing to older readers. She represents, in her book, two little girls, aged respectively twelve and fourteen, who have been sadly neglected during their early years, but fall, fortunately, at this period of their life, under the care of a Mrs. Mason, who at once undertakes to form their character and train their intellect. This good lady, in whose name Mary sermonizes, seizes upon every event of the day to teach her charges a moral lesson. The defects she attacks are those most common to childhood. Cruelty to animals, peevishness, lying, greediness, indolence, procrastination, are in turn censured, and their opposite virtues praised. Mary is careful to explain in the preface that she writes to assist teachers. She wishes to give them hints which they must apply to