ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how conduct books, by appearing as the written renditions of relationships between adults and girls, bore distinct marks of the oral culture that traditionally characterized female upbringing. Because of their different levels of experience with the education of girls, female and male authors used diverging approaches: while the women provided accounts of "actual" relationships between mothers and daughters, governesses and pupils, and female friends of different ages, their male counterparts resorted to fictions as a way to claim an experience that they had not acquired firsthand. Such an experience was conveyed through narratives predicated on the exclusivity of the relationships between individuals: dialogues, epistolary "exchanges", and parental advice, which without being stricto sensu epistolary owed much to the epistolary model. They created a context that privileged direct channels of communication between adult and child and a space on the threshold between oral and print cultures.
