Sarah Fielding's Feminist Literary Pedagogy, in Which Nasty Women Become Novel Writers

Abstract:This paper explores how Sarah Fielding's The Little Female Academy (1749) and The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757) made feminist, formal, and pedagogical interventions in the novel genre. Both books feature morally flexible characters who show their female communities how to critique and create excellent, plausible fictions. These literary women have too long been flattened in our scholarship into the quintessential anti-exemplars of the conduct book genre: a catch-all for unorthodox women's writing in the eighteenth century. It is time to reconsider Fielding's works as metafictional novels, full of covert feminist lessons for an increasingly diverse public of readers.