Modern Griselda

Maria Edgeworth's take on the famous folklore stories about the patient and submissive Griselda, The Modern Griselda (1804), is quite hilarious. It's about a wife who is basically the opposite of long-suffering Griselda. If her husband says you pronounce a word a certain way, she says it's pronounced differently. If her husband wants to sit down, she wants him to stand up. If her husband says he likes salad, she insists that eating salad will be the death of him. And so on and so forth.

The Modern Griselda is the exact opposite of the ancient one. Possessed of youth, beauty, wit, and every fashionable accomplishment, she imagines herself entitled to rule with absolute command a husband who adores her. At first her imperious disposition only manifests itself in a restless and captious fear of not being sufficiently beloved; in a jealousy of every person and thing capable of diverting, for a moment, the attention of her husband, or affording him the slightest pleasure of which she is not the source.

Maria Edgeworth (1768 1849) was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held advanced views, for a woman of her time, on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo.

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