disputes and difficulties which arose with his Irish tenantry; and,
apart from the insight which this must have afforded her into the
character and idiosyncrasies of the people, she no doubt very early
acquired that exact knowledge of leases and legacies and dishonest
factors which is a noticeable feature even of her children's books.[23]
It is some time, however, before we hear of any successor to
"Generosity"; but, in 1782, her father, with a view to provide her with
an occupation for her leisure, proposed to her to prepare a translation
of the _Adele et Theodore_ of Madame de Genlis, those letters upon
education by which that gentle and multifarious moralist acquired--to
use her own words--at once "the suffrages of the public, and the
irreconcilable hatred of all the so-called philosophers and their
partisans." At first there had been no definite thought of print in Mr,
Edgeworth's mind. But as the work progressed, the idea gathered
strength; and he began to prepare his daughter's manuscript for the
press. Then, unhappily, when the first volume was finished, Holcroft's
complete translation appeared, and made the labour needless. Yet it was
not without profit. It had been excellent practice in aiding Miss
Edgeworth's faculty of expression, and increasing her vocabulary--to say
nothing of the influence which the portraiture of individuals and the
satire of reigning follies which are the secondary characteristics of
Madame de Genlis's most well-known work, may have had on her own
subsequent efforts as a novelist. Meanwhile her mentor, Mr. Day, was
delighted at the interruption of her task. He possessed, to the full,
that rooted antipathy to feminine authorship of which we find so many
traces in Miss Burney's novels and elsewhere; and he wrote to
congratulate Mr. Edgeworth on having escaped the disgrace of having a
translating daughter. At this time, as already stated, he himself had
not become the author of _Sandford and Merton_, which, as a matter of
fact, owed its inception to the Edgeworths, being at first simply