Sarah Chapone

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Standard Name: Chapone, Sarah
Birth Name: Sarah Kirkham
Married Name: Sarah Chapone
Pseudonym: Sappho
Pseudonym: Varanese
Pseudonym: A Lady
SC was not only an active networker in the cause of women during the earlier half of the eighteenth century; she also published two works (both hard to categorise because of their originality and their remoteness from generic expectations) which show remarkable feminist, analysis. Her topics are the law, women's history (at one remove), and conventions around sexual behaviour. Her private letters, too, often touch on women's issues.
Title-page of Sarah Chapone's "The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives. With an Explanation of the Original Curse of Subjection . . . ", published anonymously in 1735. The extended title is followed by texts from the Old Testament, the publisher's colophon, and the price (one shilling).

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Hester Mulso Chapone
Hester Mulso married John Chapone , an attorney, son of Sarah (Kirkham) Chapone , on the same day that her eldest brother, Thomas , married Mary Prescott , another member of the Richardson circle.
Editor...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Elstob
By this time, however, she was acquiring a circle of patrons. She had met Sarah Chapone , parson's wife and proto-feminist, who this same year published her anonymous, hard-hitting The Hardships of the English Laws...
Friends, Associates Mary Delany
In her teen years Mary Granville enjoyed an intimate, admiring friendship with the brilliant and free-spirited Sarah Kirkham, later Chapone , whose father was a country clergyman close by the Granvilles' current residence. Her own...
Friends, Associates Mary Delany
In Gloucestershire Mary Pendarves found herself the neighbour of Sarah Kirkham (later Sarah Chapone) . They became close friends. Other members of their circle (besides Mary's sister Anne ) were Charles and especially John Wesley
Friends, Associates Mary Delany
Back in England in her second widowhood, MD was a frequent visitor to her lifelong, very close friend the Duchess of Portland . The duchess, an amateur scientist of unusual talent and achievement, brought MD
Literary responses Teresia Constantia Phillips
But TCP 's work provoked a fairly appreciative reply from the obscure, provincial, highly original feminist Sarah Chapone . The Monthly Review, too, provided a remarkably sympathetic review. While admitting that Phillips would seem...
Textual Features Mary Delany
Others, too, bear romance names in this correspondence: John and Charles Wesley are Cyrus and Araspes; Sarah Chapone is Varanese.
Wesley, John. The Works of John Wesley. Clarendon; Oxford University Press, 1975–1983.
25: 246n2
Wealth and Poverty Elizabeth Elstob
Sarah Chapone got up a subscription for EE , which brought in enough money for a pension of £20 a year. Elstob's former dedicatee Queen Caroline contributed £100 to this fund, but died before she...

Timeline

23 November 1752: George Ballard dated his preface to Memoirs...

Women writers item

23 November 1752

George Ballard dated his preface to Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain . . . (better known as Memoirs of Eminent Ladies); it was published that year.
Ballard, George. Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. Editor Perry, Ruth, Wayne State University Press, 1985.
41
Griffiths, Ralph, 1720 - 1803, and George Edward Griffiths, editors. Monthly Review. R. Griffiths.
8: 124
Staves, Susan. “Church of England Clergy and Women Writers”. Reconsidering the Bluestockings, edited by Nicole Pohl and Betty Schellenberg, Huntington Library, 2003, pp. 81-103.
84

Texts

Glover, Susan Paterson, and Sarah Chapone. “Introduction”. The Hardships of the English Laws, Routledge, 2018, pp. 1-16.
Chapone, Sarah. Remarks on Mrs. Muilman’s Letter to the Right Honourable the Earl of Chesterfield. William Owen and James Leake, 1750.
Chapone, Sarah. The Hardships of the English Laws in relation to Wives. J. Roberts, 1735.