Queer Places:
Widcombe Lodge, Church St, Bath BA2 6AZ, Regno Unito
St Mary the Virgin, Charlcombe, Bath BA1, Regno Unito
Bath Abbey, Bath BA1 1LT, Regno Unito
Sarah Fielding (8 November 1710 – 9 April 1768) was an English
author and sister of the novelist
Henry Fielding. She wrote
The Governess, or The Little Female Academy (1749), the first novel in
English aimed specifically at
children. Earlier she had success with her novel The Adventures of
David Simple (1744).[1]
In Sarah Fielding's novel Familiar Letters (1747), women's friendship
overcomes heterosexual rivalry, enabling a woman to put the future happiness
of her friend with a man before her own marriage chances.
Sarah Fielding was born in 1710 after
Henry and Ursula; her younger siblings were Anne, Beatrice, and Edmund.
Sarah's father, Edmund Feilding, the third son of John Feilding, was a
military officer and relative of the
Earls of Denbigh (his father, John, was 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's son said, "I cannot tell, my Lord, except it be that my
branch of the family were the first that knew how to spell" (Battestin 7–8).
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 and who had been considered for a bishopric in Ireland)
(Battestin 10). Henry was sent to
Eton,
but all of the daughters were sent to Mary Rookes's boarding school in
Salisbury.
When Edmund's first wife (Fielding's mother) died in 1718, Edmund married
Anne Rapha, a
Roman Catholic widow, who brought with her several children, and later
bore Edmund a son and half-brother for Henry and Sarah, the future reformer
John Fielding. Sir Henry and Lady Sarah Gould (Fielding's maternal
grandparents) had fallen out with Edmund prior to children's mother's death,
and Lady Gould was extremely displeased with Edmund's second marriage, and
Anne Fielding (née Rapha) was the subject of much anti-Catholic sentiment from
the elder generation of the family. Lady Gould was so set against Anne and her
enlargement to the family that in 1721, she sued for custody of the children
and ownership of the family house in East Stour. She eventually won, leaving
the children unable to see their father for years.
In the 1740s, Fielding moved to
London,
sometimes living with her sisters and sometimes with her brother Henry and his
family. The women of the family lacked sufficient money for a
dowry, and
consequently none married. Even when Lady Gould died in 1733, there was little
money for the children.
Fielding turned to writing to make a living. While she lived with her
brother and acted as his housekeeper, she began to write. In 1742,
Henry Fielding published
Joseph Andrews, and Fielding is often credited with having written the
letter from Leonora to Horatio (two of the characters in the book). In 1743,
Henry Fielding published his Miscellanies (containing his life of
Jonathan Wild), and Fielding may have written its narrative of the life of
Anne
Boleyn.
In 1744, Fielding published a novel, The Adventures of David Simple.
As was the habit, it was published anonymously. The novel was quite successful
and gathered praise from contemporaries, including the publisher and novelist
Samuel Richardson. Richardson, who was himself the target of Henry
Fielding's satire, said that he thought Sarah and Henry were possessed of
equal gifts of writing. The Adventures of David Simple went into a
second edition within ten weeks, and was translated into French and German.
The title pages to Fielding's novels often carried the advertisement that they
were written by "the author of David Simple". The novel was sufficiently
popular that Fielding wrote Familiar Letters between the Principal
Characters in David Simple as an
epistolary furtherance to the novel in
1747. In
1753, she wrote a sequel to The Adventures of David Simple entitled
David Simple: Volume the Last.
David Simple was one of the earliest
sentimental novels, featuring a wayfaring hero in search of true
friendship who triumphs by good nature and moral strength. He finds happiness
in marriage and a rural, bucolic life, away from the corruptions of the city.
David Simple is an analog, in a sense, to the figure of Heartsfree, in Henry
Fielding's Jonathan Wild and Squire Allworthy in his
Tom Jones. However, he also shares characteristics with other
sentimental figures who find their peace only with escape from corruption and
the harmony of a new
Utopia. In
her Volume the Last, however, Fielding's fiction, like Henry
Fielding's, is darker and shows less of a faith in the triumph of goodness in
the face of a corrosive, immoral world.
Fielding also wrote three other novels with original stories. The most
significant of these was The Governess, or The Little Female Academy in
1749, which is the first novel in English written especially for children (children's
literature). In addition, she wrote
The History of the Countess of Dellwyn in 1759, and The History of
Ophelia in 1760.
As a critic, Fielding wrote Remarks on Clarissa in 1749, concerning
the novel
Clarissa
by Samuel Richardson. As a biographer, she wrote The Lives of Cleopatra and
Octavia in 1757, a history, written from Greek and Roman sources, on the
lives of
Cleopatra and
Octavia, two famous women from Roman times. As a translator she produced
Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates, with the Defense of Socrates Before
His Judges in 1762, a work by the Ancient Greek writer and soldier
Xenophon
concerning the philosopher
Socrates.
St Mary’s Charlcombe, Bath
Fielding's sisters died between 1750 and 1751, and Henry died in 1754.
Fielding retired from London and moved to a small house just outside
Bath. The famous philanthropist
Ralph Allen and the similarly famous
Elizabeth Montagu (a member of the
Blue Stockings Society) gave her some financial aid. In around 1767,
the novelist
Sarah Scott, sister of Elizabeth Montagu, invited Fielding to come
and live with her in a female utopian community, an attempt to create
the utopia described in
Millenium Hall, but Fielding declined the invitation. Fielding
died in 1768. There is a memorial plaque to her on the west porch of
Bath Abbey.
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