Moral values in Sarah Fielding's novel “The Governess, or the Little Female Academy”

This article deals with the moral values and social issues described in the school story of the famous English writer Sarah Fielding “The Governess, or the Little Female Academy”, which is considered one of notable works written specifically for children in the Age of Enlightenment. The article examines some of the components of the genre “School Story” – the traditional opening and description of the daily routine of an educational institution for girls, plot twists, certain characters, etc. At the same time, following Sarah Fielding’s ideas, the author scrutinises the issue of children's reading and the need to discuss its content with adults. Using the examples of the wards' stories about their life before school, the problem of interpersonal relations of characters is analysed – within a family, with parents, brothers and sisters, other relatives, governesses and servants; whereas outside it, with representatives of various social groups. Much attention is paid to the depiction of behaviour etiquette and constant striving for perfection, as well as control over various emotions. As a result of the study, it is concluded that school stories are useful for young readers due to their topicality and positive general attitude, which allows adolescents to overcome numerous life difficulties during the formation and development of their personalities.

Distributed Cognition and Women Writers’ Representation of Theatre in Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind’

Readers in the mid-eighteenth century were increasingly invited to translate their knowledge about the social extension of mind learned in the experience of theatre to ‘new’ prose forms of the periodical and the novel. Women writers in these forms found opportunity to present women as cognitive agents rather than affective vehicles. Four works by women serve to illustrate this case: Eliza Haywood’s The Dramatic Historiographer (1735), Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: a new dramatic fable (1754), Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated (1753-4), and Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-6). These printed prose works invoke memories of performance – the co-presence of the real bodies of audience and actors. But they often do so to claim the superior cognitive experience of the reader’s engagement through print with a fictional persona in the ‘mind’. The prose work is imagined as a repository of socially extended mind for its audience, an opportunity not only to recreate the experience of communal consumption of the artwork which theatre affords, but also to provide a more sophisticated form of narrative scaffolding. Distance and reflection are enabled by the absence of the performer’s body and the judicious authority of a framing narrator.

4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The early novel developed modes of writing that are considered gripping and immersive, because they foreground physical states, meaningful gestures, and emotional excitement. This monograph shows how these changes relate to “embodied” and “enactive” cognition, “embed” themselves into the cultural and material contexts, and “extend” readers’ thoughts. In an investigation of works from Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Burney, it traces the ways in which such “4E cognition” can contribute to a new perspective on stylistic and narrative changes in eighteenth-century fiction. The embodied dimension of literary language is then related to the media ecologies of letter writing, book learning, and theatricality in the eighteenth century. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels real because it is integrated into the lifeworld and its embodied experiences. Together with the issue of realism, this book revisits traditional understandings of the “rise of the novel” and earlier historical perspectives in cognitive literary studies. And the perspective from 4E cognition, it is argued, opens links to book history and media ecologies that can launch historically situated cognitive approaches to literature.

Fielding: A Lifeworld of Books

This chapter investigates how Sarah Fielding develops the kind of writing that leads readers to engage with the novel in a mode of reading that is both immersed and reflective. It traces this project through Fielding’s comments on novel reading in her critical writings, her translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, and her own experimental metafiction in the 1750s (also in collaboration with Jane Collier). Fielding, it is shown, brings novel reading and its immersive qualities into conversation with the debates between the ancients and the moderns and the transhistorical perspectives arising from the mock-heroic mode. Also the theatre, and in particular Fielding’s engagement with Shakespeare, is shown to contribute to her bid to create the kind of novel that can both immerse readers and make them think.

‘Moral Romance’ and the Novel at Mid-Century

This chapter discusses several developments pertaining to the phenomenon of ‘moral romance’ as well as the state of the novel at mid-century. The 1740s were a pivotal decade for the novel in English, particularly because of the rivalry between Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Both writers notably disparaged conventional ideas about romance. In addition, the chapter explores moral romance in Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744). It shows that, although she uses the phrase ‘Moral Romance’ so diffidently in her short-lived Advertisement, Sarah Fielding has more to say about romance- and novel-writing within David Simple itself. Finally, the chapter considers the state of the novel at mid-century.