ABSTRACT
Sarah Fielding was born on November 8, 1710. Sarah's childhood experiences in Salisbury were formative in another way as well, for it was there that she met three close friends, each of whom had a substantial impact on her writing. More probably, Sarah lived in Princes Court, Westminster, with her older sister Catharine, who inherited Mrs. Cottington's estate in January 1739/40. More significantly, it provides evidence of the emerging creative and political agendas that controlled Sarah's literary career in the years following the publication of the Miscellanies. Fielding's emphasis on character development becomes so central to her work that she sometimes moves into pure fiction. Once Fielding's characters surrender to vanity, they commit themselves to the misery that necessarily accompanies loveless marriages. Although the nature of Fielding's text makes it difficult to identify all of her debts, she unmistakably borrows incidents, ideas and the occasional phrase from a variety of sources, bringing her work into conversations with other texts.
