Attention, please! Maria Edgeworth’s educational short fiction as literary experiments with attention

Abstract

In her aim to establish education as a scientifically grounded discipline-conceived as “an experimental science” in her non-fictional treatise Practical Education (1798)-Maria Edgeworth pioneered the integration of literary attention into educational practice. This paper examines her use of different short prose forms as a means of cultivating attentional capacities in young children and adolescents, while simultaneously providing educators with adaptable tools for designing exercises targeted to varying levels of attentiveness. Through close analysis of two narratives, “The Purple Jar” and “The Good French Governess”, we argue that Edgeworth’s short stories and tales experiment with various degrees of (narrative) complexity to foster the development of two key attentional habits, the transition of thought and the abstraction of attention, both essential for navigating everyday environments. Our findings suggest that Edgeworth’s literary experiments not only contribute to our understanding of attentional affordances of different short fiction forms and help advance knowledge about literature and cognition; they also underscore the pedagogical potential of “attention narratives” in educational contexts.