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.
MMS
published at Wellington in ShropshireThe Governess; or, The Little Female Academy, adapted from Sarah Fielding
.
Sherwood, Mary Martha. The Governess. F. Houlston.
title-page
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...
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...
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.
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...
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 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...
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...
