Narratives of teaching and disability in nineteenth-century children’s literature

This chapter explores the project that works against the grain of the exciting recovery work scholars are performing in the field of nineteenth-century women writers. Much of this work seeks to bring to light overlooked texts that contribute to a tradition of women writers whose work serves the project of empowering women and whose impulse is decidedly progressive. The chapter argues that Martha Finley's series, particularly the first two novels in the series, are profoundly conservative novels that perform an insidious, didactic cultural work in their depiction of idealized daughterhood. Daughters are destined for marriage, and their education in what the movement refers to as 'Virtuous Girlhood' begins by learning to submit their lives and their love to their fathers as preparation for marriage. Martha Finley draws upon the discursive strategies of a number of nineteenth-century popular genres, including children's evangelical literature, anti-Catholic literature and temperance narratives.