Recently, and to be honest a little unexpectedly, I was reminded of work I did about twenty-five years ago on the language of Sarah Fielding, the sister of, yes, but a novelist herself, as well as a scholar of Greek no less. But not a keen letter writer: only 29 of her letters have come down to us, and were published in a joint edition with those of her brother Henry (not many by him either).

So just to remind myself I dug up whatever it was I had written about her. She features of course as one of my female language informants in my Introduction to Late Modern English (EUP, 2009), and my other publications include the following, three of them in English, one in Dutch:

(2000), Social network analysis and the language of Sarah Fielding, European Journal of English Studies 4/3: 291-301.

(2000), A little learning a dangerous thing? Learning and gender in Sarah Fielding’s letters to James Harris, Language Sciences 22: 339-358.

(1997), Negation in Sarah Fielding’s Letters. In: Fries U., Müller V. & Schneider P. (Eds.), From Aelfric to the New York Times. Studies in English Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 183-195.

(1997), Sarah Fielding en haar sociale netwerk. In: Santen A. van & Wal M. van der (Eds.), Taal in tijd en ruimte. Leiden: Stichting Neerlandistiek. 113-121.

She also occurs in another paper I wrote:

(1998), Standardization of English spelling: the eighteenth-century printers’ contribution. In: Jacek Fisiak en Marcin Krygier (eds.). English historical linguistics 1996. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 457–470.

Looking at the references in these papers, I’m a little surprised to see that I never refer to Janine Barchas’s very interesting paper on Sarah Fielding’s use of dashes. Perhaps I did so elsewhere, because I remember the paper very well:

Barchas, Janine. 1996. Sarah Fielding’s dashing style and eighteenth-century print culture. ELH 63/3. 633-656.

And of course she has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A full-length bibliography of her was written by Linda Bree (1996, Twayne Publishers/Prentice Hall), and her letters can be found in the edition by Martin C. Battestin and Clive T. Probyn (eds.) (1993), The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finally, though hopefully not, there is a very recent piece on her in the wonderful online Grubstreet project, written by Matthew Risling. Not on her language, but well worth reading. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen a picture of her. There is one to be found online, would this really be her? I wonder.

In case I missed anything, I’d be happy to hear about it!