Then, unhappily, when the first volume was finished, Holcroft's
complete translation appeared, and made the labour needless. Yet it was
not without profit. It had been excellent practice in aiding Miss
Edgeworth's faculty of expression, and increasing her vocabulary--to say
nothing of the influence which the portraiture of individuals and the
satire of reigning follies which are the secondary characteristics of
Madame de Genlis's most well-known work, may have had on her own
subsequent efforts as a novelist. Meanwhile her mentor, Mr. Day, was
delighted at the interruption of her task. He possessed, to the full,
that rooted antipathy to feminine authorship of which we find so many
traces in Miss Burney's novels and elsewhere; and he wrote to
congratulate Mr. Edgeworth on having escaped the disgrace of having a
translating daughter. At this time, as already stated, he himself had
not become the author of _Sandford and Merton_, which, as a matter of
fact, owed its inception to the Edgeworths, being at first simply
intended as a short story to be inserted in the _Harry and Lucy_ Mr.
Edgeworth wrote in conjunction with his second wife, Honora Sneyd. As
regards the question of publication, both Maria and her father, although
sensible of Mr. Day's prejudices, appear to have deferred to his
arguments.
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