Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sarah Fielding
-
Standard Name: Fielding, Sarah
Birth Name: Sarah Fielding
Pseudonym: A Lady
Pseudonym: The Author of David Simple
SF
, best known as a mid-eighteenth-century novelist, tried a range of other genres as well: history, criticism, a play, a translation, and a landmark children's book which is both a work of pedagogy and commonly billed as the first school story for girls. Her reputation is gradually emerging from the shadow of her brother Henry
's and enabling recognition of her status as a woman of letters, and her pivotal position in the history of the novel.
This little book (with no notes or index) opens on an echo of Jenkins's fuller work on Austen, with a tribute to the mid eighteenth century as a time of brilliant flowering in the English...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Julia Kavanagh
In this second work of women's literary history, JK
once again limits herself to the novel. Her canon comprises ten authors, from Aphra Behn
to Sydney Morgan
by way of Sarah Fielding
, Frances Burney
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Charlotte Yonge
CM's preface (dated March 1870) says that as a child she preferred the inherited books of the former generation to any moderns except Maria Edgeworth
.
Yonge, Charlotte, editor. A Storehouse of Stories. Macmillan.
Margaret Collier
suggests that JC
wrote an unfinished play. In her sister's commonplace-book, she remarks on a play featuring a character who is always reading other people's thoughts (I know you think me unreasonable...
Textual Production
Mary Collyer
An anonymous novel appeared entitled The History of Betty Barnes: it has sometimes been attributed to Sarah Fielding
, but is actually by MC
, as literary historian Joyce Grossman
has shown.
Grossman, Joyce. “Social Protest and the Mid-Century Novel: Mary Collyer’s <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>The History of Betty Barnes</span>”;. Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in their Lives, Work, and Culture, edited by Linda V. Troost, Vol.
1
, pp. 165-84.
165
Grossman, Joyce. “Social Protest and the Mid-Century Novel: Mary Collyer’s <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>The History of Betty Barnes</span>”;. Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in their Lives, Work, and Culture, edited by Linda V. Troost, Vol.
For a young woman who had never attended university (as she of course could not at this time) to offer a translation from a classical language was both courageous and confident.
It was a long...
Textual Production
Gillian Clarke
GC
published Prior Park: A Compleat Landscape, about the Palladian mansion outside Bath built by Ralph Allen
, the patron of Sarah Fielding
.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production
Jane Collier
JC
wrote to Samuel Richardson
to explain why he ought not to make a change he wished to in Sarah Fielding
's The Governess.
Fielding, Henry, and Sarah Fielding. The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding. Editors Battestin, Martin C. and Clive T. Probyn, Clarendon Press.
xxix-xxx
Textual Production
Phebe Gibbes
It was advertised in this month and re-advertised several years after its first appearance. The full title is Modern Seduction, or Innocence Betrayed: Consisting of Several Histories of the Principal Magdalens, Received into that Charity...
Textual Production
Sarah Scott
In November 1759 appeared (bearing the date 1760) an anonymous work of fiction purporting to be socially conscious fact, The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House. SS
was almost certainly implicated...
Textual Production
Charlotte Lennox
She had written most of it by November 1751. With Johnson
as mediator, she consulted Richardson
about revisions, denouement, optimum length (she reduced her plan from three volumes to two), and about her choice of...
Textual Production
Edith Somerville
They wrote and re-wrote by turns, and maintained (like Sarah Fielding
and Jane Collier
a century earlier in The Cry) that it was impossible to separate the woven texture of their finished writing into...
Textual Production
Jane Collier
The second of these criticisms was a letter in answer to Edward Cave
, who had published in the Gentleman's Magazine the argument of a Swiss professor, Albrecht von Haller
, that Clarissa was wrong...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Hamilton
This was published at Bath and London. EH
did serious historical research for this book, reading all the Roman history she could find in English and even commissioning translations.
There was already women's work...
Timeline
By February 1752: James Harris (friend of Sarah Fielding and...
Writing climate item
By February 1752
James Harris
(friend of Sarah Fielding
and Jane Collier
) published Hermes: or, A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Language and Universal Grammar.
1774: The British Novelist: Or, Virtue and Vice...
Writing climate item
1774
The British Novelist: Or, Virtue and Vice in Miniature was published in twelve volumes of abridged texts by Sarah
and Henry Fielding
, Richardson
, Smollett
, and Lennox
.
1818: The successful children's writer Elizabeth...
Women writers item
1818
The successful children's writerElizabeth Sandham
published The School-Fellows, a Moral Tale, which devotes a chapter to commemoration of Princess Charlotte
(who had died on 6 November 1817).
By Christmas 1869: Francis Galton, mathematician, scientist,...
Writing climate item
By Christmas 1869
Francis Galton
, mathematician, scientist, and eugenicist, published Hereditary Genius: An Enquiry into its Laws and Consequences,
Texts
Fielding, Sarah. Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple. Priinted for the author and sold by A. Millar, 1747.
Sabor, Peter, and Sarah Fielding. “Introduction”. The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last, University Press of Kentucky, 1998, p. vii - xli.
Fielding, Sarah. Remarks on Clarissa, Addressed to the Author. J. Robinson, 1749.
Fielding, Sarah. The Adventures of David Simple. A. Millar, 1744.
Fielding, Sarah. The Adventures of David Simple, Volume the Last. A. Millar, 1753.
Fielding, Henry, and Sarah Fielding. The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding. Editors Battestin, Martin C. and Clive T. Probyn, Clarendon Press, 1993.
Fielding, Sarah, and Jane Collier. The Cry. R. and J. Dodsley, 1754.
Fielding, Sarah. The Governess. A. Millar, 1749.
Fielding, Sarah, and Jill E. Grey. The Governess. Oxford University Press, 1968.
Fielding, Sarah. The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House. John Rivington and J. Dodsley, 1760.
Fielding, Sarah. The History of Ophelia. R. Baldwin, 1760.
Fielding, Sarah. The History of the Countess of Dellwyn. A. Millar, 1759.
Fielding, Sarah. The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia. Printed for the author and sold by A. Millar; J. Dodsley, and J. Leake, 1757.
Fielding, Sarah. The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia. Editor Johnson, Christopher Dyer, Bucknell University Press and Associated University Presses, 1994.
Fielding, Sarah. Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, With the Defence of Socrates. A. Millar, 1762.
