SOURCE: "Education and Ideology in Sarah Fielding's The Governess," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 24, 1995, pp. 210–8.

Below, Wilner argues that Fielding's The Governess is not a subversive text, but is a conservative didactic narrative that leaves unchallenged prevailing bourgeois patriarchal values, and instead presages eighteenth and nineteenth-century idealizations of domestic, middle-class womanhood.

Sarah Fielding, author of nine works of fiction and a translation of Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates, has been characterized by several critics in recent years as a proto-feminist. One interpreter of her first novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), points to her "radical questioning of basic values" at mid-century and views that novel as a critique of the "feminine virtues" of innocence, passivity, and privacy, suggesting that Fielding ultimately sees these virtues as "crippling weaknesses" and that "in her vision of women together, where woman can be Self, not other, Sarah Fielding is revolutionary."¹ Another critic...