Fielding, Sarah | Deborah Downs-Miers (essay date 1986)
Deborah Downs-Miers (essay date 1986)
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...
[The entire page is 7793 words long]
Navigate
