Sarah Fielding’s Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia: Anecdote and Women’s Biographical Histories

The proliferation of anecdotal writing over the course of the eighteenth century offers an interesting pathway to questions of genre adaptation in the period. Lionel Gossman’s argument—that from their European advent, these “highly concentrated miniature narratives” were “closely related to history, and even to a kind of counter history”—identifies anecdote with the most prestigious of contemporary forms.¹ But anecdote was also important to other, so-called lesser strands of historiography, and in particular to modes such as biography, reshaped in the decades following the 1750s by a new attention to private experience and personality. Sarah Fielding’s Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757) appears at this critical juncture. Described by its author as a Plutarchan “Biography” infused with “some Mixture of Romance,” and by modern critics variously as biography, orientalist text, historical fiction, satire, novel, and didactic tale, the work has a categorical indeterminacy ideally suited to exploring the relation between biography’s emergent focus on inwardness and the English tradition of anecdotal writing that stretches from the late seventeenth century to the Romantic period.² While Cleopatra and Octavia did not exert any observable influence on its successors, Fielding’s inventive adjustments to the anecdotal secret histories she inherited illuminate the spate of early nineteenth-century biographical histories, particularly those written by women. Comparison of Cleopatra and Octavia with Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina (1804), Elizabeth Benger’s comments on that work in her 1818 Memoirs of the late Mrs. Hamilton, and Lucy Aikin’s reflections on her own Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1819) suggests that by realigning Fielding’s unstable genre mix these later writers articulated a version of anecdotal biographical history that was deemed appropriate for women in ways that political history was not.

The emergence of anecdote as a distinct mode following the 1674 translation of Procopius’ Anekdota as The Secret History of the Court of Justinian, combined with its subsequent ubiquity, makes it a particularly useful guide to genre transformation. Initially Whiggish in orientation, English secret histories retailed scurrilous anecdotes about court culture in an effort to expose monarchical abuses of “power, privilege, and prerogative” and thereby make the case for “limited constitutional monarchy.”³ Subsequent Tory polemicists, most notably Delarivier Manley, retained their predecessors’ emphasis on sexual intrigue and on the suspect motivations of private individuals who sought to direct affairs of state to their own benefit. While Isaac D’Israeli’s Enquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First (1816) condemned the nineteenth-century reprinting of these early secret histories, dismissing them as “garbage” that “would have perished in their own merited neglect” had they not been “dragged from their lurking holes,” his contemporaries clearly relished both older and more recent exercises in political defamation.⁴ D’Israeli himself made extended use of existing anecdotal secret histories when writing his James the First and Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England (1828), and Sarah Green’s The Private History of the Court of England (1808) revives the techniques of the romans à clef when she sets her narrative in the period of Henry VI, finding in assumed names and a remote period a cover for her satire on Regency corruption.

For many writers before mid-century, including Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, “Anecdotes, or secret History” were very nearly transposable terms.⁵ But as anecdotal modes proliferated, the initial identification with secret history loosened and new narrative possibilities emerged. Evidence of changes in the representational functions of anecdote can thus be seen not only in the continuing interest in the secret histories that Eve Tavor Bannet denominates “a self-conscious genre of historical, political, and life-writing” reaching from Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, John Oldmixon, and Henry Brook through to Walter Scott’s nineteenth-century two-volume compilation on the Jacobean court, but also, more generally, in anecdote’s evidential importance to developing professions, including law and medicine; its late-century authorizing as a rich source of quasi...