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.
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 Features
Sarah Trimmer
In addition to Catharine Cappe
's work on Sunday schools and versions of fairy stories by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy
, the magazine reviewed work by a whole library of didactic, pedagogical, or improving writers, reprinted as...
Textual Features
Sarah Murray
The preface to this volume dwells on preserving female purity and delicacy, on good education, and on the potentially harmful effect of novels. The author says she aims not only at giving some small assistance...
Textual Features
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
The Sylph of the title is the secret, unidentified adviser of the heroine, Julia, Lady Stanley (who before her marriage was a naive country girl), during her not always successful struggles to live morally amid...
Textual Features
Clara Reeve
CR
demonstrates the widest possible reading: from Homer
, Virgil
and Horace
(all revered) and Juvenal
and Persius
(used to prove that not all classical authors are admirable) through the heroic romances like those of...
Textual Features
Mary Jones
MJ
's letters cover the period from 1732 to 1748, from the writer's mid twenties till she was just over forty. Like her poems themselves they are full of the business of poetry and authorship...
Textual Features
Mary Latter
The first letter, the earliest piece in the volume, was said to have been written seventeen years ago at the age of seventeen: to Myra, which suggests that ML
may have been one among...
Textual Features
Jane Collier
It vividly reflects the liveliness and originality of JC
's mind, her interest in books (from the classics and the Bible to very recent publications), education, women's issues, family life, and in moral interpretation of...
Textual Features
Charlotte Lennox
The novel's opening is an early example of a technique which was to remain popular with authors for generations: About the middle of July 17 — . . . , where the precise day and...
Textual Features
Jane Collier
The commonplace-book throws light on Collier's other extant writings as well. A casual mention of what Sally calls the Turba proves definitively that at least one neologism in The Cry stemmed not from her but...
Reception
Eliza Haywood
EH
's reputation during her lifetime and immediately afterwards (bolstered by Pope's image of her in the Dunciad) was of the quintessential practitioner of the novel, seen as low-grade entertainment both intellectually and morally...
