Sarah Scott & Clara Reeve

As far as we know, Sarah Scott closed her publication career in 1772 with The Test of Filial Duty, in a Series of Letters between Miss Emilia Leonard and Miss Charlotte Arlington: A Novel, in two volumes. Since the publication of A Journey through Every Stage of Life eighteen years earlier, much had happened in Scott’s personal and literary life, and similarly much had happened in development of the genre of the novel. By the 1770s, the ‘Richardsonian revolution’ in the novel, especially the epistolary form, had been taken in a number of directions, by writers in Britain and Europe. Not only did many women writers turn to the form, exploiting historic and conventional cultural associations of women and the private sphere with the form of familiar letters, but prominent male proponents of Enlightenment culture, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Tobias Smollett, used this genre in the 1760s and 1770s as a suitable vehicle for disseminating these movements. In The Test of Filial Duty Scott herself takes up the epistolary form for the first time and adapts it, too, to the interests of Bluestocking feminism. In A Journey through Every Stage of Life, and her subsequent novels Millenium Hall and Sir George Ellison, she used something like the parable in order to present Bluestocking feminism. In The Test of Filial Duty she does so largely by incorporating major elements of romance, including the popular narrative of the fairy tale, and the courtship novel, into a work that otherwise purposely exhibits the characteristics of the novel as it was then increasingly understood, in distinction from the romance – as a representation of ‘real’ life.