ted the novel with a purpose.

Perhaps no phrase has been more misunderstood than this of "a novel with
a purpose."

Obviously it is not only right but imperative that a novel, or any work
of art, should have a leading idea, an aim; but this is markedly
different from a didactic purpose, which is implied by the phrase.
Readers of novels demand before all else to be entertained, and are
justified in that demand, and they merely submit to such instruction or
moralizing as can be poured into their minds without giving them too
much trouble. Miss Edgeworth lost sight of this too often; indeed, it
was a point of view that did not enter into her philosophy, narrowed as
her experience was by the boundaries of home and the all-pervading
influence of her father's passion for the didactic. The omission proved
the stumbling-block that hindered her novels from attaining the highest
excellence. A moral was ever uppermost in Miss Edgeworth's mind, and for
its sake she often strained truth and sacrificed tenderness. She was
forever weighted by her purpose; hence her imagination, her talents, had
not free play, and hence the tendency in all her writings to make things
take a more definite course than they do in real life, where purpose and
results are not always immediately in harmony, nor indeed always
evident. Miss Kavanagh has aptly said, "Life is more mysterious than
Miss Edgeworth has made it." Having said this, however, we have laid our
finger upon the weak point of her novels, in which there is so much to
praise, such marked ability, such delicious humor, such exuberant
creative fancy and variety, that the general public does very ill to
have allowed them to sink so much into oblivion.

Between the years 1804 and 1813 Miss Edgeworth published _Leonora_,
_Griselda_, and the stories of various length that were issued under the
collective titles of _Tales front Fashionable Life_ and _Popular Tales_.
_Leonora_ was the first work she wrote after her return from France,
where she had enlarged the sphere of her mind and heart. It is a marked
improvement upon _Belinda_, the fable is better contrived, the language
flows more easily. It was penned with a view to please M. Edelcrantz,
and in respect of being written for one special reader, _Leonora_
recalls that curious work by Madame Riccoboni, _Lettres de Fanni
Butlerd a Milord Charles Alfred_, published as a fiction, but in reality
only the collection of the writer's love-letters to t