SOURCE: Marsden, Jean I. “Letters on a Tombstone: Mothers and Literacy in Mary Lamb's Mrs. Leicester's School.” Children's Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children 23 (1995): 31-44.

In the following essay, Marsden discussesMrs. Leicester's School, arguing that Lamb's relationship with her mother influenced the lack of a stereotypical maternal figure apparent in other similar works.

The gift of education represented so vividly in Maria Edgeworth's “Madame de Fleury” stands in contrast to a more problematic vision of education published within a year of Edgeworth's work. In Edgeworth's tale, unlike the work by Mary Lamb that is the subject for this essay, formal schooling is the gift of a benevolent maternal figure who enriches a child's life and in so doing reiterates a cultural expectation linking mothers, or mother surrogates, and education.¹ Mothers, writes Hannah More, are responsible for, and even empowered through, educating their children...