Original Stories from Real Life

Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness is the only complete work of children's literature by the 18th-century English feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft.

In Original Stories, Wollstonecraft employed the then-burgeoning genre of children's literature to promote the education of women and an emerging middle-class ideology.

She argued that women would be able to become rational adults if they were educated properly as children, which was not a widely held belief in the 18th century, and contended that the nascent middle-class ethos was superior to the court culture represented by fairy tales and to the values of chance and luck found in chapbook stories for the poor.

She became acquainted with a Miss Mason while teaching in Newington Green, whom she greatly respected, and she taught two girls named Mary and Caroline while she was a governess for the Kingsborough family in Ireland.

They are full of faults, such as greediness and vanity, and Mrs. Mason, through stories, real-world demonstrations, and her own example, cures the girls of most of their moral failings and imbues them with a desire to be virtuous.

The inset stories themselves emphasise the balance of reason and emotion required for the girls to become mature, a theme that permeates Wollstonecraft's works, particularly A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Original Stories gained a reputation in the 20th century as an oppressively didactic book and was derided by early scholars of children's literature such as Geoffrey Summerfield.

[11] Recent scholars, particularly Mitzi Myers, have re-evaluated Wollstonecraft's book and 18th-century children's literature in general, assessing it within its historical context rather than judging it according to modern tastes.

[12] These authors believed that they could effect great change by exposing young children to their ideas of a better society, even though they were "only" writing stories about seemingly insignificant topics such as small animals or little girls.

"[14] Wollstonecraft's Mrs. Mason takes Mary and Caroline out into the world in order to instruct them—their very first lesson is a nature walk that teaches them not to torture but rather to respect animals as part of God's creation.

[15] Mrs. Mason uses the experiences of everyday life as a teaching tool because they are grounded in concrete realities and easily absorbed through the senses; she will seize on "a bad habit, a passerby, a visit, a natural scene, a holiday festivity" and then apply them to a moral lesson that she wants to inculcate into her pupils.

She had not, by doing good, prepared her soul for another state, or cherished any hopes that could disarm death of its terrors, or render that last sleep sweet—its approach was dreadful!—and she hastened her end, scolding the physician for not curing her.

[19] At the end of one visit, Mrs. Mason reminds the girls that Mrs. Trueman "loves truth, and she is ever exercising benevolence and love—from the insect, that she avoids treading on, her affection may be traced to that Being who lives for ever.—And it is from her goodness her agreeable qualities spring.

As Myers writes, "to convey her message for female readers that achievement comes from within, Wollstonecraft substitutes the strength, force, and mental expansion associated with heroic sublime for the littleness, delicacy, and beauty that Rousseau and aestheticians such as Edmund Burke equate with womanhood".

The ‘stories’ are ‘original’ because narratives for children should start afresh in order to avoid continued ideological contamination from vulgar chapbooks or courtly ‘fairy tales’.

These ‘conversations’ and ‘stories’ are also to construct the youthful self in a particular way, by regulating ‘the affections’ or emotional self and forming ‘the mind’ or rational and moral self ‘to truth and goodness’—understood in terms of professional middle-class culture.

In contrast to Rousseau's presentation of Sophie, the fictional figure he employs in Book V of Emile to represent the ideal woman, who is enamoured of her own image in a mirror and who falls in love with a character in a novel,[30] Wollstonecraft depicts Mrs. Mason as a rational and sincere teacher who attempts to pass those traits on to Mary and Caroline.

[32] Works by children's writers such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Ellenor Fenn, Sarah Trimmer, and Dorothy Kilner all embrace this ethos, although they differ radically in their opinions on other political issues, such as the French Revolution.

[33] One way that writers such as Wollstonecraft helped to shape the new genre of children's literature at the end of the 18th century was by attempting to remove its chapbook and fairy tale associations and replace them with a middle-class ideology.

As Kelly explains, "traditional chapbook literature embodies a lottery mentality of carpe diem, belief in fortune, wish for lucky gifts (such as great strength, cleverness or beauty), a view of time as cyclical or repetitive and an avid interest in predicting the future.

[35] William Blake, who often did illustrative work for Wollstonecraft's publisher Joseph Johnson,[citation needed] was engaged to design and engrave six plates for the second edition of Original Stories.

The hats that the children wear are drawn in such a way that they form halos around their heads, a touch Blake also uses in Songs of Innocence and of Experience to indicate the innate and divine visionary capacity of the child (see for example "The Ecchoing Green" and "The Little [B]oy Found").

She agrees that the children's hats resemble halos but she identifies Mrs. Mason's position as one of a "protective cruciform", evoking a "heroic, even Christlike ... female mentorial tradition".

Joseph Johnson, the publisher of Original Stories and all of Wollstonecraft's other works, commissioned William Blake to design six illustrations for the second edition, which cost two shillings and six pence.