Fielding, Sarah

Sarah Fielding, (born Nov. 8, 1710, East Stour, Dorset, Eng.—died April 9, 1768, Bath, Somerset), English author and translator whose novels were among the earliest in the English language and the first to examine the interior lives of women and children.

Fielding was the younger sister of the novelist Henry Fielding, whom many readers believed to be the author of novels she published anonymously, although he denied these speculations in print. She lived with her brother following the death of his wife in 1744. That year she published her first book, The Adventures of David Simple, a novel whose comic prose style imitated that of both her brother and his chief literary rival, Samuel Richardson, who was also one of her close friends. With the sequel, The Adventures of David Simple, Volume the Last: In Which His History Is Concluded (1753), she developed a style more distinctly her own, which shows greater intricacy of feeling, fuller development of character, and a reduced reliance on plot.

The Governess (1749) is didactic and portrays with comic sensibility the hazards of British social life for the moral development of women. Considered the first novel for girls in the English language, it was an immediate success and went through five editions in Fielding’s lifetime while inspiring numerous imitations.

She published only one book under her own name, a translation from the ancient Greek of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates (1762), a significant achievement in that few women of Fielding’s time acquired a scholarly command of Classical languages. Other works include a collaboration with her friend Jane Collier titled The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754). Although didacticism frequently overshadows the narrative drive of Fielding’s prose, critics credit her as an innovator with a shrewd sense of human motive and keen ironic humour.