Wikipedia:Today's featured article/March 4, 2017

Sabrina Sidney (1757–1843) was a British foundling girl taken in when she was 12 by the author Thomas Day, who wanted to mould her into his perfect wife. As an adult she worked with the schoolmaster Charles Burney, managing his schools. In 1769 Day took Sabrina to France to begin methods of education inspired by Rousseau's Emile, or On Education. When she reached her teenage years, Day's friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth persuaded him that his ideal-wife experiment had failed. In 1783 Sabrina was told the truth about Day's experiment and confronted him in a series of letters. In 1804, Anna Seward published a book about Sabrina's upbringing. In his 1820 memoirs, Edgeworth said that Sabrina and Day made a good match and that she loved him. Sabrina countered that Day had made her miserable, and that she had effectively been a slave. The story of Sabrina's life has been told in Wendy Moore's 2013 book How to Create the Perfect Wife and dramatised in the 2015 BBC Radio 4 play The Imperfect Education of Sabrina Sidney.