Abstract

This article deals with the works of Ellenor Fenn, a great eighteenth century educator, and those nineteenth century female writers who were influenced by her. We begin with the hypothesis that in spite of the influence of other authors, especially John Ash, on her grammar books, her work offers an innovative and pioneering methodology by including the game as a didactic strategy (a precursor of the current ludology), as well as the gradual approach and the conversational format (anticipation of child directed speech). Ellenor Fenn, through her easy and basic grammar texts, contributed to the development of English linguistics. Although her texts were addressed, mainly, to a female infantile public, she included methodological clues for mothers to be able to teach their daughters at home. Thus, she intended to make the Saxon grammar accessible to the female public who did not have any education, in contrast to the dense and theoretical grammars of her male peers. Feminist literary criticism aims to recover the works of female writers who have been forgotten or excluded from the linguistic canon, as in the case of our author. It is very important to recognize the work of women, above all of the pioneers of nonliterary works, as educational and linguistic ones. Including the works of female linguists in the grammatical canon would also expand the history of the English language, because its use was not an exclusively male activity. In fact, Fenn’s publications were considered favorably in newspapers of the time by peer critics such as William Godwin or William Enfield. Furthermore, her work “The Mother’s Grammar” (1791) had twenty-one hard copies in London and “The Child’s Grammar” (1791), forty-five. Such was the popularity of her methodological resources that these had great repercussions on the grammar books of female linguists of the nineteenth century such as Eliza Fenwick, Jane Haldimand Marcet, and Julia Corner. In conclusion, Lady Fenn has founded a female linguistic tradition.