In the latter part of 1820, Maria Edgeworth, accompanied by her two much younger stepsisters, was on an extended visit to the Continent and staying in Pregny, close to Geneva. From Switzerland, Edgeworth directed a triangular correspondence, the other vertices of which were her ‘dear Triumvirate Council of critics and friends’ at home in the Irish midlands, and the publisher Rowland Hunter in London. Manuscript, transcripts, critical opinions, proofs and views on marketing circulated between the three sets of participants. At issue was the preparation for the press of a work that Hunter would publish in 1821: Rosamond: A Sequel to Early Lessons. At one point in the correspondence, Edgeworth reassured those at home who had expressed doubts as to what was apparently Hunter’s preferred title: ‘Sequel does not exclusively mean end. It means also Continuation or what follows.’ Origins and beginnings are the stuff of myth and glamour; ‘Continuation or what follows’ attracts less notice, but it too can be venturesome. Rosamond occurs in that interstitial period between childhood and young adulthood, taking its young heroine from age eleven to fourteen, an age when girls are considered ‘neither quite as children, nor quite as women’. Frank: A Sequel to Early Lessons (1822) concerns a younger child, nine when the sequel begins and eleven at its close. In spatial terms, both works broach new ground as their young protagonists encounter new social situations and challenges beyond the protected familial spaces in which Edgeworth’s works for younger children, Early Lessons (1801) and Early Lessons Continued (1814), mainly occur. Edgeworth’s sequels represent the receptive and expressive powers of older children as they acquire knowledge of the self and of the world, come to understand themselves as separate from the supportive family matrix and begin to establish themselves as gendered speaking subjects. Through continuation, through the process of imagining ‘what follows’, Edgeworth pushed into new spaces and contributed to an expanded understanding of what fiction might be. The juncture of Edgeworth’s literary career at which these fictions were written was one in which writerly acts of ‘continuation’ held especial resonance. With the death in 1817 of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria lost not only a much-loved father but also a literary collaborator, one Edgeworth was inclined to credit as a moving force for her work: ‘it was to please my father I first exerted myself to write, to please him I continued’.