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"The Purple Jar" is a well-known short story by Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), an Anglo-Irish writer of novels and stories. "The Purple Jar" first was published in The Parent's Assistant (1796) and reappeared in Rosamond (1801). Of the dozens of stories Edgeworth wrote in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this parable of desire and disappointment retains an extraordinary hold on the public and literary imagination.
The story is about a young girl, Rosamund, who needs new pair of shoes but is attracted to a purple jar which she sees displayed in a shop window. When her mother gives her the choice of spending her money on shoes or the jar, she chooses the purple jar. "You might be disappointed", her mother cautions, adding that Rosamund will not be able to buy new shoes until the next month. When the girl gets home, she discovers that the jar was not purple but filled with dark liquid. She cries: "I didn't want this black stuff!" Adding to her disappointment, her father refuses to take her out in public because she looks slovenly without good shoes.
In the 21st century, scholars have read this story as a parable of consumer capitalism. It has also been discussed as dramatizing a girl's disappointed awareness of menstruation in the context of an unsympathetic mother and a disgusted father.