Sarah Scott - Early Life and Marriage

Early Life and Marriage

Sarah was well educated, and she was very interested in literature and politics. In 1741, Sarah contracted smallpox. David Shuttleton notes that "Scott's pronounced concern ... was motivated by her own experience of being left marked by a severe bout of smallpox contracted in April 1741 when she was eighteen; a trauma which had played a key role in redirecting her away from emulating the social success of her equally beautiful sister Elizabeth (Robinson), towards a life dedicated to writing, domestic female friendship and Christian philanthropy" (135). Her sister Elizabeth, after becoming friend to Lady Margaret Harley and being introduced to the highest circles of London life, married Edward Montagu. Sarah then moved back home to tend to her mother, who was dying of cancer. When Sarah's mother died in 1746, she went with Elizabeth to Bath for a visit. There she met her future longtime companion, Lady Barbara Montagu. In 1748, the two women pooled their finances and took a house together.

When Sarah was twenty, she contracted to marry George Lewis Scott, a friend of the family's from Canterbury who was twelve years older than Sarah. He had no profession or private income, however, and Sarah's dowry amounted to only fifteen hundred pounds, so before the two could wed, Sarah, through her friend "Lady Bab" and sister, secured Scott a position as a sub-preceptor to George, Prince of Wales (later King George III). Prince George had lately succeeded his father, Frederick, upon Frederick's death in March 1751.

According to Barbara Schnorrenberg, Sarah lived with her sister, Elizabeth, and was treated as a servant, and this is why she was willing to make an unsuitable and undesired marriage. Sarah and George Lewis Scott were married in June 1751. The marriage, according to family letters, was never consummated (Kelly, 469), and in April 1752 something happened that brought both Sarah's father and brothers to come to London to remove her from her husband's house. When she was no longer with her husband, she was her father's charge, and he gave her no money at all. Further, he forbade Elizabeth or Sarah's brother Matthew from relieving Sarah's poverty. George Lewis Scott agreed to pay her a settlement of a hundred pounds a year.

Sarah and Lady Barbara Montagu settled in Bath, where they lived frugally and became active in helping the poor, and especially poor women. They began a project of creating cottage industries for poor and disgraced women, and they began attempting to educate the poor in 1754. Sarah Scott had written her first novel the year before her marriage, in 1750: The History of Cornelia. It was a portrait of an ideal and pious young woman. In 1754, she attempted to generate an income by translation and wrote An Agreeable Ugliness based on an exaggeratedly moralistic French source. The same year, she also wrote A Journey through every Stage of Life, which is an Arabian Nights-styled series of tales told by a young serving girl to a displaced princess.

In 1760, with the accession of George III, she wrote a political work about Gustav I of Sweden, The History of Gustavus Ericson, King of Sweden, picking up on the theme of the patriot king. She also wrote The History of Mecklenburg, from the First Settlement of the Vandals in that Country to the Present Time the next year, to capitalise on the public's interest in George III's wife, Charlotte.

In 1762, Scott published her novel, A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent (her spelling). It went through four editions, and interest in it as a feminist text has revived in the 21st century.