SOURCE: Introduction to The Cry, by Sarah Fielding, Scholars' Facsimilies & Reprints, Inc., 1986, pp. 5-11.

Below, Schofield discusses how Fielding and Jane Collier in their collaborative novel, The Cry, subvert the traditional romance genre to explore the female psyche and to critique the genre itself.

Fielding's observations [in The Cry] are shrewd. Like her contemporary fellow-novelist Eliza Haywood,¹ she hides her radical observations under the cover of the accepted romance story, using the popular topos of the masquerade.² She probes beneath the ubiquitous disguise in order to expose and delineate the state and fate of the mid-eighteenth-century woman; as she writes in several prefaces, probing is, of course, the narrative strategy employed by the major female novelists of the period, as well as by Samuel Richardson; none, however, are as overtly vocal as Sarah Fielding in explaining the sub-text/sub-version method, the rhetorical technique, which she always employs in...