Sarah Fielding (8 November 1710 – 9 April 1768) was an English writer and sister of the playwright, novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding. She wrote The Governess, or The Little Female Academy (1749), thought to be the first novel in English aimed expressly at children. Earlier she had success with her novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744-53).

Childhood

Sarah Fielding was born at East Stour, Dorset in 1710 to Edmund Feilding [sic] and his wife Sarah, née Gould (died 1718), after Henry and Ursula; her younger siblings were Anne, Beatrice, and Edmund. Sarah's father, Edmund, the third son of John Feilding, was a military officer and relative of the Earls of Denbigh (his father, John, had been the youngest son of the 3rd Earl). Although Edmund spelled his last name "Feilding" as often as "Fielding," both Henry and Sarah spelled the name "Fielding." When asked by an Earl of Denbigh why, Henry Fielding said, "I cannot tell, my Lord, except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to spell". Sarah Fielding's mother, Sarah Gould, was the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a judge on the King's Bench who had been reappointed to the Queen's Bench. This descent is important for understanding the early life and education of Edmund Feilding's children.

Edmund left the care of his children to his wife's mother, Lady Sarah Gould, while he built his career in London. The children grew up in her home in Glastonbury and their paternal grandfather's house in East Stour (John Feilding being a latitudinarian Cambridge-educated parish priest with three livings, who had been considered for a bishopric in Ireland. Henry was sent to Eton, but all of the daughters were sent to Mary Rookes's boarding school in Salisbury. This was "non-academic, but she was later extremely well read in Greek, Latin, French and English." the anonymous Charlotte Summers has traditionally been attributed to Sarah Fielding, but scholars now generally believe that "nothing but conjecture" links her to the novel, or even that it is "certainly not" her work.

Notes

References

  • Chawton House Women's Writing Entry
  • Martin C. Battestin and Ruthe R. Battestin: Henry Fielding: A Life. New York: Routledge, 1989

Further reading

  • Barchas, Janine. "Sarah Fielding's Dashing Style and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture". ELH 63.3 (1996): 633–56.
  • Battestin, Martin C. and Clive T. Probyn, eds. The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
  • Battestin, Martin C. "Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, and 'the Dreadful Sin of Incest'". Novel 13.1 (1979): 6–18.
  • Bree, Linda. Sarah Fielding. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.
  • Downs-Miers, Deborah. "Spring the Trap: Subtexts and Subversions". Fetter'd or Free?: British Women Novelists, 1670–1815. Eds. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986.
  • Eaves, T. C. Duncan and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
  • Fielding, Sarah. The History of Ophelia. Ed. Peter Sabor. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004. .
  • Johnson, Christopher D. "Introduction". The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia. London: Associated University Presses, 1994.
  • Needham, Arnold E. The Life and Works of Sarah Fielding. 1943.
  • Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  • Rizzo, Betty. Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-Century British Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
  • Sabor, Peter. "Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Sarah Fielding". The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740-1830. Eds. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  • Schellenberg, Betty A. The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  • Schofield, Mary Anne. Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind. University of Delaware Press, 1990.
  • Skinner, Gillian. "'The Price of a Tear': Economic Sense and Sensibility in Sarah Fielding's David Simple". Literature and History 3rd series. 1.1 (1992): 16–28.
  • Spencer, Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
  • Spender, Dale. Mothers of the Novel. London: Pandora, 1986.
  • Stern, Simon. "Speech and Property in David Simple." ELH 79.3 (2012): 623–54.
  • Stockstill, Ashley. "Better Homes and Gardens: The Fairy World(s) of Sarah Fielding and Sarah Scott". Feminist Studies in English Literature 6.2 (1998): 137–58.
  • Terry, Richard. "David Simple and the Fallacy of Friendship". SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. 44.3 (2004): 525–44.
  • Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
  • Woodward, Carolyn. "Sarah Fielding's Self-Destructing Utopia: The Adventures of David Simple". Living by the Pen: Early British Women Writers. Ed. Dale Spender. New York: Teachers College Press, 1992.