Conservative or Reformer?: The History and Fortune of Fénelon’s Traité de l’Éducation des filles in Eighteenth-Century England

Why was François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon’s Traité de l’Éducation des filles (1693) published in part by Richard Steele in his popular The Ladies Library (1614) and serialized by Charlotte Lennox in her periodical, The Lady’s Museum (1760)? This question deserves to be raised because Fénelon’s text was produced in a specifically French Catholic and political context that was fairly different from the English context of the 1710s and the 1760s. Indeed, Fénelon’s educational reforms for girls were part of a wider religious and political platform that clearly sought to defend—in reaction to King Louis XIV’s politeness policy—a conservative ideal of an agrarian and aristocratic society where the traditional gender hierarchy was emphasized. The aim of this article is therefore to analyze the themes and extracts from De l’Éducation des filles that Steele and Lennox chose to translate, in order to assess what trend—conservative or reformist—these two authors privileged when they publicized Fénelon’s ideas on female education. This essay concludes that both Steele and Lennox adapted Fénelon’s treatise for their own ends that were sometimes in contradiction to Fénelon’s original intentions. It seems that Steele ignored Fénelon’s hostility to politeness and used the treatise to promote a Whig agenda that redefined politeness along English lines. Lennox was more interested in Fénelon’s pedagogical methods and their impact on very young children as well as on mothers. This essay therefore seeks to reassess Steele’s and Lennox’s originality and conservatism. It also contends that although Fénelon’s treatise is hardly mentioned by historians of education, Fénelon was alongside Rousseau and Locke as one of the most influential educationalists in eighteenth-century England.