Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sarah Scott
-
Standard Name: Scott, Sarah
Birth Name: Sarah Robinson
Nickname: Sally
Nickname: Pea
Nickname: Bridget
Married Name: Sarah Scott
Pseudonym: A Person of Quality
Pseudonym: Henry Augustus Raymond, Esq.
Pseudonym: A Gentleman on his Travels
SS
, who published during the second half of the eighteenth century, wrote for money and never signed her name to her work. She is known as a novelist; but as a historian and translator she also deserves the appellation of woman of letters, and as one who chose to pursue an alternative, carefully-thought-out, woman-centred lifestyle she deserves the appellation of feminist. Her fictional writing does not repeat itself in form but takes on new technical issues with each title. Her concerns are always those of proto-feminism: the problems of middle-class women disadvantaged by poverty, lack of beauty, and absence of outlets for their talents, and the plight of lower-class women and the disabled.
SF
has often been named as author or co-author of a fictional work, The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, which appeared anonymously (dated 1760) fifteen months after the institution opened...
Wealth and Poverty
Sarah Fielding
In later years she received financial aid from her half-brother Sir John Fielding
(who paid her £20 most years from 1761), from Ralph Allen
(who left her a legacy of £100 in August 1764), and...
Friends, Associates
Sarah Fielding
Socially speaking, Bath was a good choice for her, putting her within reach of, for instance, James Leake
and Ralph Allen
, as well as many friends visiting from London. The group comprising her, Scott
Publishing
Sarah Fielding
She described herself as the Author of David Simple on the title-page of this and of all her subsequent fictional works. She did not put her name on a title-page until her last book. This...
Publishing
Sarah Fielding
The work was dedicated to Lady Pomfret
. Its 440 subscribers included many prominent people, reflecting the bluestockings' range of influence as well as SF
's local and family connections: Ralph Allen
, Lord Chesterfield
Textual Production
Sarah Fielding
This work, no longer attributed to SF
's single authorship, was printed, as several of hers were, by Samuel Richardson
. But letters written about it by Lady Barbara Montagu
(friend and partner of the...
Textual Production
Susannah Dobson
Samuel Johnson
supposed, nearly a decade after its production, that The Life of Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, 1772, was by SD
: actually it was the last work of Sarah Scott
, who always published anonymously.
Johnson, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Editor Redford, Bruce, Princeton University Press.
4: 147
Fictionalization
Mary Delany
MD
is generally recognised to be the original of Miss Melvyn (later Mrs Morgan) in Sarah Scott
's Millenium Hall.
Thaddeus, Janice. “Mary Delany, Model to the Age”. History, Gender & Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Beth Fowkes Tobin, University of Georgia Press, pp. 113-40.
128-9
Friends, Associates
Dorothea Celesia
In Genoa in February 1763 DC
and her husband entertained William and Mary Robinson (brother and sister-in-law of the writers Elizabeth Montagu
and Sarah Scott
). Mary Robinson reported on 11 February
Jones, W. Powell, and William Robinson. “The William Robinsons in Italy”. Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol.
4
, No. 3, pp. 343-57.
352, 357
that...
Family and Intimate relationships
Margaret Calderwood
MC
's editor gives plenty of space to the exploits of her Steuart ancestors: to her great-grandfather, Sir James Stewart (1608-81), Lord Provost of Edinburgh, who attempted to be a moderate in Covenanting times and...
Leisure and Society
Lady Eleanor Butler
Their self-consciously utopian existence was probably modelled in part on Sarah Scott
's Millenium Hall. While the Ladies were a byword for gentility, their Irish servant Mary Carryll
was known as Molly the Bruiser...
Friends, Associates
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Their initial friendship seems to have cooled slightly, but ALB
wrote Chapone's obituary, as well as that of a Chapone brother. She also met at about the same time Elizabeth Carter
, Sarah Scott
...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB
's first hymn presents the world, as God creates and adorns it and pronounces it good, as a female body.
