User:Sarahfieldingproject/sandbox

Reception History
It is clear that Sarah Fielding struggled throughout her writing career to step out from the shadow of her brother. She is often completely overlooked or only briefly mentioned in articles about her brother because critics suspect he took credit for some of her writing. It was hard enough for women to break in to "the male-dominated novelistic pantheon" mentioned by Richard Taylor. He states that Sarah Fielding is one of many women writers who have only recently been able to gain recognition. Sarah Fielding had her gender working against her as well as an overpowering brother.

Authors Sim and Walker and Walker state that the reason for Sarah Fielding’s writing was primarily motivated by self-interest. Fielding used writing as a way to make money because she was unable to marry due to her unavailability to a dowry. Many articles point out that Sarah Fielding seems to be present in the works of Henry Fielding. An article by J. F. Burrows and Anthony J. Hassall shows that there is a lot of skepticism surrounding the portions of Henry Fielding’s work that is from the point of view of women. There seems to be sufficient cause for thinking that the narration from women is not his original work because he so often scoffed at female authorship and style.

Because Sarah Fielding's family did not have enough money to give her a dowry for a marriage, her only option was to live with her brother and work as his housekeeper. Sarah Fielding's brother, Henry Fielding, played a huge role in the reconstruction of some of her works. Janine Barchas goes into great detail about how Henry revised Sarah Fielding’s works so extensively that much of Sarah’s voice and meaning was lost (Barchas 1996). It is said that she uses many dashes in an unconventional way that Henry interprets as mistakes, but it was discovered that Sarah was using them to add context and feeling to her writing. It is clear that Sarah is under the patriarchal and disproving microscope of her brother, but is unable to do anything about it. This is evidence that once a man had the ownership control over the work of a female author, it was impossible for the female to regain control of her intellectual property. At a time in history where people were still fighting for copyright and publishing laws, this article shows how outside opinions take away from the quality of original thoughts.

Fielding also pushed the boundaries of using the masculine technique of satire within her accepted space of being a respected female. Fielding was walking a fine line as she skillfully wrote a satirical novel while staying true to her virtue. She is contrasted against Behn’s prostitute persona to show how greatly she cared for maintaining her virtue unlike Behn. Sarah Fielding seems to be someone who is frequently passed over when research is done on women writers. Results for her brother, Henry, continuously show up instead of direct results for Sarah Fielding.In an article about several works of literature, Karin Kukkonen examines Fielding’s ability to convey and express the aspect of a social mind. In several of Fielding’s works, she demonstrates the ability to give her characters a social mind in which the reader knows what the narrator is thinking, but the other characters in the story do not (Kukkonen 2016). This was a seen as a novel version of having dramatic irony in a live play performance. There is a strong perspective that because she could convey a characters true thoughts and feelings to the reader without the other characters finding out, that Sarah Fielding and many other writers of this time period were also able to do the same with their authorship. The authors are argued to have been able to convey their true thoughts, feelings, and commentary through their literary works while keeping their “social mind” as a front. In other words, they would be able to write whatever they wanted and keep their noses clean for a good reputation if they wanted to do so.