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.
The narrator claims not to be TCP
, but a close male friend. A prime suspect is the hack writer Paul Whitehead
, who was one of her lovers. Nevertheless the tone has convinced many...
Textual Production
Jane Collier
This single-page allegory in JC
's commonplace-book figures her literary collaboration with Sarah Fielding
as a shared project in dress-making.
Collier, Jane et al. Common Place Book.
78
Londry, Michael. “Our dear Miss Jenny Collier”. Times Literary Supplement, pp. 13-14.
13
Their method of needlework gives a pleasing new turn to the patchwork trope...
Textual Production
Jane Collier
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...
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.
1
, pp. 165-84.
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
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
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
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...
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
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
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...
Reception
Maria Edgeworth
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.