ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the significant implications of the prefaces structural variations with the help of Genette's classifications. It outlines what these prefatory texts revealed about the challenges of writing for a marginal readership and discusses how the status of this audience affected the expression of authorial responsibility. What conduct-book authors conveyed in their prefaces was the discomfort of their position as pioneers who constructed adolescent girls as readers and partners rather than mere objects of discourse. The mission of conduct books was to ensure the social training and moral education of girls, but the girls' fundamental lack of autonomy meant that, to gain access to the text, they depended on more mature reader. The emintently interpersonal dimension of prefatory discourse connects it to what Pierre Bourdieu has described using the concepts of doxa and orthodoxy. The various tactics pervasive in prefaces signaled the incompatibility that the women and men who wrote conduct books felt with the prevailing orthodoxy in the education of girls.
