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.