Sarah Fielding

ABOUT SARAH FIELDING

Remembered for writing the first-ever English-language novel for children, she published her famous work The Governess, or The Little Female Academy in 1749. She is also notable for a sentimental novel for older readers titled The Adventures of David Simple (published in 1744).

Lacking dowry funds, she could not marry, so she began building a career as a writer instead. Many literary critics surmise that she contributed to several of the early works of her author brother.

A biographer as well as a fiction writer, she published a 1757 work titled The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia.

She was the younger sister of satirical dramatist and novelist Henry Fielding and the older half-sister of social reformer John Fielding. The daughter of Edmund Fielding and Sarah Gould, she grew up in Bath, England, and had, in addition to Henry and John, siblings named Ursula, Beatrice, Edmund, and Anne.

She and Hannah More were both 18th-century, English, female writers.