Sarah Fielding (review)

REVIEWS 375 Linda Bree. Sarah Fielding. Twayne's English Authors, no. 522. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. xii + 149pp. ISBN 0-8057-7051-8. Readers of eighteenth-century fiction will welcome Linda Bree's Sarah Fielding, which provides the only currently available book-length introduction to Sarah Fielding and her work. Bree's study begins with a twenty-eight-page biographical essay, which is indebted to Martin C. Battestin's Henry Fielding: A Life (1989) and to Battestin and Clive C. Probyn's The Correspondence ofHenry and Sarah Fielding (1993). Throughout this chapter, Bree commendably organizes the few extant facts of Sarah Fielding's life and defines her career in relation to other women authors of the eighteenth century. In creating her portrait, Bree not only draws upon appropriate primary and secondary sources, but also interprets Fielding's works perceptively, often finding meaning in the seemingly insignificant. The discussion of the Advertisement for the first edition of David Simple, for example , is particularly astute and will be useful for students and teachers alike. Subsequent chapters address Fielding's major works, providing readings that are coherent and accessible. Bree is adept at defining Fielding's work within larger contexts: chapter 2, for example, meaningfully connects David Simple to quixotic fiction, to exempla, and to the emerging cult of sensibility. When discussing The Governess, Bree unpackages eighteenth-century fears of fairy-tales and explains Evangelical condemnations of Fielding's apparently innocuous fiction . In Fielding's most unusual work, The Cry, Bree finds "something close to allegory" and explains how Fielding's fiction "explores the troubled tensions involved in the relationship between language and reality" (pp. 93, 100), a central concern in several of her works. Discussing her last novel, The History ofOphelia , Bree shows how Fielding's work is both similar to and distinct from later Gothic fiction. The study ends with a short chapter that traces Fielding's literary reputation from the eighteenth century to the present. These chapters are largely successful and will be valuable for undergraduate students and those preparing to teach undergraduates. Such an audience, however , will occasionally wish for more guidance than Bree provides. Early in the text, for example, Joseph Warton is defined only as "one young man" (p. 1 1). Bree ends her discussion of The Governess by quoting an inscription that appears on a Cambridge University copy of the novel. The significance of the inscription , however, is never explained, and the otherwise excellent chapter ends¦on a note of confusion. Bree maintains that The History of Ophelia subverts the conventions of epistolary fiction and that the novel's heroine differs from other heroines who experience abduction. This discussion would be stronger if the author identified more clearly the conventions and heroines to which she refers. Bree acknowledges Richardson's Lovelace as the "famous fictional predecessor" of Fielding's Dorchester, but says little else (p. 143). At times Bree's work becomes more problematic. Writing about The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, Bree observes that prior to Fielding's work "Cleopatra had always been described by men and regarded primarily as an object of male desire" (p. 112). To support her argument, Bree contrasts a passage from 376 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:3 Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with a similar passage from Fielding's work, hoping to show how Fielding's account emphasizes Cleopatra's "ambition and skillful management" of Antony rather than her mysterious charms (p. 113). Though Bree's argument is sound, the supporting evidence is flawed. The passage from Fielding, as demonstrated in one of Bree's sources, is an almost word-for-word borrowing from Charles Fraser's translation of Plutarch. Far from a "deliberate deflation of Shakespeare" that demonstrates originality , the passage is an adaptation of Fraser that illustrates Fielding's debt to her principal source (p. 113). These shortcomings, however, are minor. Bree's study provides a significant contribution to Sarah Fielding scholarship and will be useful for students exploring her fiction. Christopher D. Johnson Francis Marion University Frederick G. Ribble and Anne G. Ribble. Fielding's Library: An Annotated Catalogue. Charlottesville: The Bibliographic Society of the University of Virginia, 1996. lxxv + 435pp. ISBN 1-883631-04-1...