SOURCE: "Girls Must Be Seen and Heard: Domestic Surveillance in Sarah Fielding's The Governess," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1994, pp. 8–13.

In the following essay, Burdan suggests that in The Governess, Fielding provides a model of progressive education for girls based on Enlightenment thought and using pedagogical tools of observation believed to be specifically suited for females.

Sarah Fielding's The Governess, or, Little Female Academy (1749), the tale of the various adventures of the nine girls in Mrs. Teachum's school, has been described by Jill Grey as not only "the first novel for children" (39), but as also the first realistic account of children as "characters taken from ordinary life and using ordinary everyday speech" (79).¹ Fielding's novel, through its status as an engaging tale of girlhood, enacts a lesson derived, in large measure, from John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and adapted for the purpose of demonstrating proper female...