ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the short stories of Maria Edgeworth's Moral Tales and the essays of Practical Education as early companion pieces where fiction, instruction, and the didactic intermingle in Edgeworth's writing to construct and prescribe complex identities. It suggests that Edgeworth acknowledges distinct 'contact zones' between these spaces. The chapter argues against the literary practice of dividing and analyzing the corpus of Edgeworth's work by genre. It suggests that clarity can prove helpful in preventing misreadings of the more ambiguous portions of her novels and juvenile fiction when her prose and fiction are read together. The chapter also argues that Maria Edgeworth provides a new and different prescription for both male and female subjectivity through her pedagogical work and that she consciously challenges public and private boundaries, redrawing these boundaries through her texts and fictions. It suggests that as an educator, Maria Edgeworth was deeply concerned with the moral and ethical implications of the divide between public and private.
