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.
MAR
focuses on the impossibility for middle-class women of earning an honest living, and the gradual male takeover of traditionally female jobs. She laments the fact that men no longer offer women adequate protection, and...
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...
With Clarissa's rape and death, Richardson's circle became more critical than they had been all along, and objections from them and other readers began flowing thick and fast. The whole novel was discussed in print...
Friends, Associates
Sarah Scott
SS
formed a friendship with Sarah Fielding
at Bath.
Rizzo, Betty, and Sarah Scott. “Introduction”. The History of Sir George Ellison, University Press of Kentucky, p. ix - xlv.
xvii
Friends, Associates
Sarah Scott
When these two settled at Batheaston, they became part of a circle of women that included friends they had already made: Sarah Fielding, Elizabeth Cutts
, Margaret Riggs
(whose daughter was to continue the...
Textual Production
Sarah Scott
In November 1759 appeared (bearing the date 1760) an anonymous work of fiction purporting to be socially conscious fact, The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House. SS
was almost certainly implicated...
Literary responses
Evelyn Sharp
Beverly Lyon Clark
, who wrote an introduction to this book and thought extremely highly of it, argued that the neglect of it stemmed from its belonging not just to one but to several under-appreciated...
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
Literary responses
Mary Martha Sherwood
Charlotte Yonge
in 1870 wrote that MMS
had adapted the original to her own Evangelical style and had introduced one admirable fairy tale.
Yonge, Charlotte, editor. A Storehouse of Stories. Macmillan.
1: vii
Mika Suzuki
has commented on Sherwood's relation to Fielding
in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Smith
Here, under the rubric of writing only scenes of modern life and possible events and eschewing the craze for the wild, the terrible, and the supernatural,
Smith, Charlotte. The Young Philosopher. Editor Kraft, Elizabeth, University Press of Kentucky.
5
CS
once more questions the social structure and...
Textual Production
Edith Somerville
They wrote and re-wrote by turns, and maintained (like Sarah Fielding
and Jane Collier
a century earlier in The Cry) that it was impossible to separate the woven texture of their finished writing into...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Taylor
This is both a conduct book and a work of epistolary fiction, in the style of Sarah Fielding
's The Governess, like it much concerned with the building of friendships. JT
, who contributed...