"It has been my daughter's aim to promote by all her works the progress of education from the cradle to the grave. All the parts of this series of moral fiction bear upon the faults and excellencies of different ages and classes; and they have all risen from that view of society which we have laid before the public in more didactic works on education." Such a method of writing tended to kill emotion, yet emotion breaks out at times with genuine force, and always has a true ring. This is especially true in the _Tales of Fashionable Life_. There society women appear cold and heartless in the drawing-room, and so they have generally been represented in fiction. So Thackeray regarded them. But Maria Edgeworth followed them to the boudoir, and there reveals beneath the laces and jewels many beautiful womanly traits. As we see in tale after tale true feeling welling to the surface, and then choked up by the moral, we recognise the pathetic truth that Mr. Edgeworth's educational methods were fatal to genius. But strong emotion sways only a small part of the lives of most men and women. Were it otherwise, like the great lyric poets, we should all die young. And she has written about the common, everyday, prosaic life with a truthfulness rarely excelled. One of the most interesting studies in a novel is to observe the author's view of life. With the exception of those of Mademoiselle De Scudéri nearly all the novels of French women considered love as the ruling passion for happiness or woe, and all of the characters were under its sway. Even Mademoiselle De Scudéri in the preface to _Ibrahim_ announced it as her distinct purpose that all her heroes were to be ruled by the two most sublime passions, love and ambition; but she was a humorist and unconsciously interested her readers more by her witty descriptions of people than by the loves of Cyrus and Mandane. But this passion has seldom held such an exaggerated place in the stories of English women. Maria Edgeworth in particular noticed that men and women were actuated by many motives or passions. A large income or a title was often capable of inspiring a feeling so akin to love that even the bosom that felt its glow was unable to distinguish the difference. Loss of respect could kill the strongest passion, and some of her heroines have even remained single, or else married men whom at first they had regarded with indifference, rather than marry the object of their first love after he had forfeited their esteem. Sometimes the tameness of her heroines shocked their author. While correcting _Belinda_ for Mrs. Barbauld's "Novelists' Library," Miss Edgeworth wrote to a friend: "I really was so provoked with the cold tameness of that stick or stone Belinda, that I could have torn the pages out."