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When Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis's 1782 Adèle et Théodore ou lettres sur l’éducation was translated into English and published as Adelaide and Theodore, or Letters on Education in 1783, it was heralded by the English Review as ‘by much the best system of education ever published in France’. High praise indeed for a work which appeared just twenty years after Rousseau's Émile, or On Education. Adelaide and Theodore clearly captured the imaginations of both British readers and publishers in the 1780s and 1790s: a new edition of the translation was published in 1784, and this was reprinted in 1788 and 1796. It could even been argued that the work was a late eighteenth-century pan-European phenomenon, since Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Russian translations appeared at various points throughout this period.

Part of the attraction of the publication was due to the celebrity of the author herself. Stéphanie-Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin was born at Champcery near Autun in Burgundy in 1746, the oldest child of Pierre-César Ducrest and Marie-Françoise-Félicité Mauget de Mézières. The chateau of St. Aubin, Genlis tells the readers of her 1825 Memoirs ‘resembled those which Mrs. Radcliffe has since described. It was ancient and ruinous, and had old towers, and immense courtyards’. In this state of genteel poverty, Genlis's early education was largely neglected: she was cared for by the staff in her parents’ house and taught a little catechism. Genlis's parents’ involvement in her education seems to have been minimal as she recounts in her Memoirs: