For Father's Day, I just have one little thought to share: two of Austen's heroes, Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram, are particularly prone to correcting their heroine's word usage. Have you noticed?  Here are some examples:

      In the last post, I gave a run down of Bear and Forbear, a novella for girls, in which the heroine Julia Marchmont meekly endures both the snobbish cruelty of her in-laws and the false accusations of her husband. 
     Bear and Forbear was one of four novellas by a "Miss Woodland," which were “intended to illustrate the force of education, and the dangers of mistakes in the commencement of life.” Bear and Forbear preaches that wives should be gentle, good-humoured, and accommodating if they want to be happy in life. The other three books focus on a particular failing: the dangers of indolence, the dangers of excessive pride, and the dangers of partiality, that is, favouring one child over another. ​ 
       The publishing history of these four novellas indicates that they were re-issued and more widely read in the early part of the 19th century than the novels of Jane Austen. The publisher even paid for engraved frontispieces for all the books.
      So who was Miss M. Woodland, the now-forgotten author of these four novellas? Was she an evangelical like the Rev. Fordyce or Hannah More? Who published this kind of finger-waggy didactic stuff for children?  Well, the answer quite surprised me.
        Bear and Forbear and the other three novellas were first published by children’s book publisher Benjamin Tabart. Tabart went bankrupt in 1810 and five years later, another publisher, M.J. Godwin, published all four tales separately and together as one volume. American editions came out in 1827.
        Who was M.J. Godwin? Why am I surprised?...