ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788), a didactic novel for children, presents an educational journey through which two female children are educated initially in the countryside and come into maturity in London. In this article, I scrutinize how this process maps their epistemological geography of childhood and citizenship – continuously from the country to the city. The first section draws on the geography of childhood by focusing on the two female characters’ early education in the rural community. The second section analyzes the ways in which the female citizenship is achieved in the metropolitan setting and reads the girls’ shopping and philanthropy as their social engagement with the metropolitan space. I thus argue that Wollstonecraft in Stories depicts how modern female agency is communalized in the small rural town and fully enriched within the context of the metropolis.
