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.
ME
had more lasting influence than her predecessors on the development of the girls'-school-story tradition in English, though Sarah Fielding
's The Governess stands at the head of the genre.
Literary responses
Amelia B. Edwards
Henry Fothergill Chorley
in the Athenæum faulted the book as being something close to a textbook under the guise of entertainment. Young people, he argued, resent such books as engines of oppression.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1788 (1862): 151
Birth
Henry Fielding
He was the elder brother of Sarah Fielding
, and second cousin of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
(their grandfathers were brothers).
Reception
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
The answer, written by a woman for a man [and now generally agreed to be by Montagu], woundingly concludes, the Fruit that can fall without shakeing / Indeed is too mellow for me.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy. Editors Halsband, Robert and Isobel Grundy, Oxford University Press.
263
These...
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 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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Phebe Gibbes
She supplies a kind of cast list of characters, and says she has written A Dramatic Novel
Gibbes, Phebe. The Niece; or, The History of Sukey Thornby. F. Noble.
prelims
largely in dialogue, without the interruptions of Said he and Said she.
Gibbes, Phebe. The Niece; or, The History of Sukey Thornby. F. Noble.
prelims
(In claiming the novelty...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Sarah Gooch
ESG
quotes on her title-page from James Hammond
and early in her first volume from Samuel Johnson
(no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author).
Gooch, Elizabeth Sarah. The Life of Mrs Gooch. Printed for the authoress and sold by C. and G. Kearsley.
1: 11
The quotation from...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Green
Literary discussion spills over from the preface into the text. The Rev. Edward Marsham, surprisingly for one of his profession, finds Hannah More
's Coelebs too religious; he prefers canonical novelists who teach virtue and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Hamilton
EH
opens with a challenge to the ignorant, since only they might suppose her subject-matter here to be unfeminine. She combines two topics: Indian or Hindu society and English, allegedly Christian society, with special emphasis...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Haywood
This book's full title, with its reference to a Search after Happiness, sounds like a possible source for Sarah Fielding
's David Simple, whose hero is depicted in Search of a Real Friend...
Literary responses
Eliza Haywood
In the Monthly Review, Ralph Griffiths
passed a judgement which was inflected against Betsy Thoughtless by issues of gender. He guessed that the author was female because of the novel's attention to matters of...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Inchbald
The story is set in London, where a brother and sister are starving, and are helped by a man who appears benevolent but actually hopes to seduce the sister. The pair turn out not...
