Jane Collier - Style

Style

Collier's The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting has been described as the "best-known generic satire written in the eighteenth century by a woman." She is one of the many female 18th-century authors (including Frances Burney, Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, and Charlotte Turner Smith) who experimented with "alternative models for relationships, for different ways of regarding others and even for ameliorating society."

As a sign of his favor for Collier's style, satiric humor, and classical learning, Henry Fielding wrote in the beginning of an edition of Horace:

To Miss Jane Collyer,

This Edition of the best

of all the Roman Poets,

as a Memorial (however poor)

of the highest Esteem for

an Understanding more than

Female, mixed with virtues almost

more than human, gives, offers up

and dedicates her Sincere Friend

Henry Fielding

This was one of the last works that Fielding would write because he left that evening on a trip to Lisbon where he died two months later.