Book: Original Stories from Real Life

Overview
Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1788 Original Stories from Real Life is a didactic narrative designed to form the minds and habits of young readers through scenes drawn from everyday experience. Instead of offering fables or marvels, it presents moral instruction anchored in observation, reason, and the steady cultivation of character, anticipating arguments she would later develop about women’s rational capacities and the aims of education.

Frame and Characters
The book is organized around a simple frame: two sisters, Mary and Caroline, have been indulged into vanity, petulance, and thoughtless sensibility. They are placed under the guardianship of Mrs. Mason, a calm, principled woman whose task is to reform them. The instruction unfolds over a sequence of walks, visits, and conversations in the countryside. Rather than impose rules by fiat, Mrs. Mason uses what the girls encounter, people’s conduct, natural processes, reversals of fortune, to prompt reflection, drawing lessons that the girls test against their own impulses and habits.

Episodes and Moral Lessons
Each short chapter turns on a concrete situation: a household managed with prudence or waste, a craftsman’s patient skill, a family struggling with illness or grief, children tempted to cruelty or deceit, a fashionable acquaintance preoccupied with show. Mrs. Mason sometimes relates inset narratives of misjudged marriages, imprudence, and perseverance to animate abstract principles and show their long-term consequences. Encounters with poverty awaken sympathy but are framed to distinguish thoughtful charity from careless sentiment. Observing labor and domestic economy teaches the value of industry and foresight. Scenes involving animals foster a steady kindness that resists both callousness and indulgence. The sisters begin by performing goodness for praise; gradually they learn to check vanity, resist caprice, and act from principle even when unseen.

Themes and Ideas
The book advances a program of rational education grounded in daily practice. Virtue appears not as sudden feeling but as a habit of self-command, guided by conscience and respect for others. Wollstonecraft aims to recalibrate “sensibility,” warning that tears and quick sympathies can become self-regarding unless moderated by judgment. Social themes surface throughout: she critiques pride of rank, highlights the dignity of useful work, and urges the well-off to recognize their responsibilities without romanticizing poverty. Religious language of Providence gives moral weight to choices, yet the emphasis falls on accountability here and now. For girls especially, the lessons counter a culture that prizes ornament and obedience over understanding, insisting that reason, not mere compliance, should govern conduct.

Style and Pedagogy
The prose is plain and direct, shaped by dialogue between the firm but affectionate Mrs. Mason and her pupils. Repetition and review consolidate learning; errors are corrected promptly but without humiliation. Nature functions as a didactic text, cycles of growth and decay, cause and effect, effort and reward, and the book repeatedly ties outward order to inward discipline. Rather than threaten punishment, it models deliberation, shows consequences, and invites the girls to take pleasure in doing right.

Significance
Original Stories from Real Life helped establish the English moral tale for children, later developed by writers like Sarah Trimmer and Maria Edgeworth. It also forms a bridge to Wollstonecraft’s political thought: educating girls as reasoning agents is presented as both a private good and a public necessity. A later edition was illustrated by William Blake, underscoring the work’s cultural reach. Its enduring interest lies in the integration of sympathetic feeling with rational self-governance, and in the conviction that everyday life, attentively read, supplies all the materials needed for moral education.