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.
MS
brings her list up to date with significant women writers who have published since the appearance of The Feminead. Her information is not perfect—she credits Anna Williams
with some works actually written by...
Textual Features
Mrs Ross
Among a large cast, Mrs Charlton (who has a protegee, the daughter of her early love, who is intensely but secretly unhappy) and Mrs Finch are old maids and glad to be so. Althea (youngest...
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
Clara Reeve
This is an extension of The School for Widows: it argues for reform (including improved education for women) as a preventative for revolution. Its ideas, however, may sound reactionary, and its version of gender-roles...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Montagu
The letters of EM
's youth—to the Duchess of Portland
and to her sister Sarah Scott
—are sparkling, irreverent, and inventive. Some of these were conveyed via Elizabeth Elstob
.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Her early claim about the...
Textual Features
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
In Herland, three American men (Terry, Van, and Jeff) happen upon an all-female civilization in South America (rather as George Ellison and Mr Lamont happen upon the female society in Sarah Scott
's Millenium...
Textual Features
Eliza Haywood
True to her name, EH
's heroine snubs Mr Trueworth because she really can't be bothered with him. She is already sorry before (ignoring ominous nightmares) she marries the egregious Mr Munden. He not only...
Textual Features
Sarah Trimmer
This use of instruction cards was innovative, at least in England. ST
may or may not have known of the cards issued by Sarah Scott
and Lady Barbara Montagu
in April 1759 (which failed as...
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, The Hyde Edition, Princeton University Press, 1992–1994, 5 vols.
4: 147
Textual Production
Sarah Fielding
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...
Textual Production
Phebe Gibbes
It was advertised in this month and re-advertised several years after its first appearance. The full title is Modern Seduction, or Innocence Betrayed: Consisting of Several Histories of the Principal Magdalens, Received into that Charity...
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
Anna Jane Vardill
Tabby-Hall, as a community of unattached women, was invented by members of the Attic Chest circle run by Eleanor Anne Porden
.
Snell, Susan. “Enlightenment Females and Freemasonry”. Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, Vol.
4
, No. 1-2, 2013.
n42
It fits somewhere between Sarah Scott
's idealised Millenium Hall and Elizabeth Gaskell
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...