ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Ann Martin Taylor self-reflexively explores the materiality of her work. It demonstrates that all three of developing literary conceptions of dissenting motherhood are at play in Taylor's writing. By employing the authority of the written mother at the centre of her popular educational advice literature, Taylor encourages her daughter-reader to internalise the spiritual morality that she presents. Taylor's self-consciousness about the textual and material nature of her advice, coupled with her employment of the genre of maternal advice texts, enabled her to elevate the position of the maternal educator to a figure that represented both spiritual and intellectual salvation. Taylor's conception of a written maternal voice creates a static maternal discourse that implies authority through permanence. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall note that Taylor's writing was the fruit of her own experience as a mother, while also acknowledging her literary debt to the maternal educational writers Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More.
