SOURCE: "Springing the Trap: Subtexts and Subversions," in Fetter'd or Free?: British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, Ohio University Press, 1986, pp. 308-323.

In the following essay, Downs-Miers examines the literary strategies and conventions Fielding used to create texts that would appeal to a middle-class market, even though her narratives included unconventional explorations of the female psyche and challenges to prevailing eighteenth-century views of womanhood.

Sarah Fielding (1710-68), like Virginia Woolf two hundred years later, was a popular novelist, a conscious experimenter in the art of fiction, a journalist, a self-taught classicist, and a feminist. Her works reveal two primary concerns; the exploration of one becomes the various assertions of the other. These concerns are "the labyrinths of the mind" and the absolute necessity that women be equal with men in education and in marriage. Sarah Fielding presents and explains these issues in...