Sarah Fielding | Biography

Sarah Fielding's novels have been described as precursors of various late-eighteenth-century literary forms: her interest in psychology and the problem of evil seems anticipatory of Gothic fiction, while the apologue David Simple (1744) has much in common with Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759). But her fiction has other kinds of appeal that range beyond questions of influence. It allows one to see, in a single writer's career, the evolution of a popular narrative form aimed at the new audience analyzed by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957). In her works, one can follow innovations in the novel between 1740 and 1760 in which representative characters embodying abstract principles give way to more introspective ones, with a consequent attention to psychological process. Writing in a period dominated by her more famous brother Henry and by Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding moves toward a new style, that of sentimental fiction, and...
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