Sarah Stickney Ellis

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The prolific SSE , author of thirty-four books, was the most popular writer of Victorian conduct literature. Her four advice books addressed women in the burgeoning middle class; she also wrote novels, poems, and didactic short fiction.
Ogden, Daryl. “Double Visions: Sarah Stickney Ellis, George Eliot, and the Politics of Domesticity”. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol.
25
, No. 6, pp. 585-02.
599n1
One critic suggests that SSE may have been a key transitional figure in moving British literary tastes from the Romantics to the novels of domestic realism written from the 1840s.
Colby, Vineta. Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. Princeton University Press.
passim
Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, editors. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Garland.
Generally, however, she is grouped with Mrs Beeton or the later writer Eliza Lynn Linton as purveying suffocating middle-class ideologies of womanhood. In The Women of England and its sequels she produced prescriptive anthropology—itself a bourgeois fantasy—of middle-class domesticity. Critics Karen Chase and Michael Levenson place her in the company of Dickens as one of the deep designers of the midcentury family imagination.
Chase, Karen, and Michael Levenson. The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family. Princeton University Press.
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Milestones

1799

Sarah Stickney (later SSE ) was born at Ridgmont in the area of Yorkshire called Holderness.
Sutherland and Shattock incorrectly give 1812 as her year of birth.
Ellis, Sarah Stickney. The Home Life and Letters of Mrs. Ellis. J. Nisbet.
1, 2

1830

Sarah Stickney, later SSE , anonymously published her first work, The Negro Slave. A Tale. Addressed to the Women of Great Britain (whose stance is, of course, anti-slavery).
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1839

SSE 's best known work, the enormously popular conduct manual The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits appeared under the name Mrs Ellis; her preface, dated February 1839, bore her full name.
Ellis, Sarah Stickney. The Women of England. Fisher.
prelims

16 June 1872

SSE died one week after her husband , at Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire.
Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, editors. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Garland.
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge.

Biography

Birth

1799

Sarah Stickney (later SSE ) was born at Ridgmont in the area of Yorkshire called Holderness.
Sutherland and Shattock incorrectly give 1812 as her year of birth.
Ellis, Sarah Stickney. The Home Life and Letters of Mrs. Ellis. J. Nisbet.
1, 2