Sarah Green

01 January 1770 - 01 January 1825

Besides a conduct book, a translation, and a pamphlet, SG wrote most fictional forms available to her: novels in several modes, stories, romances, and most notably mock-romances. She was one of the ten most prolific novelists of 1800-19

Green, Sarah. “Introduction: Romantic Reading and Writing: The Creation and Consumption of the Early Nineteenth-Century Novel; A Note on the Text”. Romance Readers and Romance Writers, edited by Christopher Goulding, Pickering and Chatto, 2010, p. ix - xxii, xxix-xxxi.

(and not all of her nearly twenty titles are discussed here). Like Jane Austen , another mocker of the conventions of women's fiction, she was steeped in the writers she laughed at. Her opinions are strictly conservative; yet she ranges freely in subject-matter, creates lively and spirited heroines, and leavens the weight of moral judgement with the play of irony. Her career spanned the years 1790-1825, and she clearly took it seriously. She began putting her name on title-pages in about 1810.

BirthName: Sarah
Her surname at birth is not known.
Married: Green
Pseudonyms: The Author of Mental Improvement; The Author of the Tankerville Family . . . . ; The Author of the Private History of the Court of England; S. G****; A Cockney

Milestones

By October 1825

SG published what seems to be her last novel, Parents and Wives; or, Inconsistency and Mistakes, with her name and an extensive listing of previous titles.

Quarterly Review. J. Murray.

32 (1825): 549

Biography

An Untraced Birth and Family

The date of SG 's birth (in Ireland, it was said)

Watkins, John, and Frederic Shoberl. A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland. H. Colburn, 1816.

is unknown. Even if she began publishing at an early age, she must probably have been born by about 1770.