Sarah Fyge Egerton

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Sarah Fyge Egerton (1670–1723), poet, was born in London. She is best known for The Female Advocate (1686), a verse satire published in response to Robert Gould's misogynist satire, A Late Satyr Against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy, etc. of Woman (1682). By her own report she was fourteen years old when she wrote it. Her father was not proud of her precocity: he sent her to live in the country and then married her, apparently unwillingly, to Edward Field. After Field's death she was remarried, to the Revd Thomas Egerton (d. 1720). Delarivier Manley, formerly a close friend, mocked in print the contentious nature of the marriage.

Apart from The Female Advocate, Egerton is notable for having contributed both to Luctus Britannici, or, The Tears of the British Muses and The Nine Muses, both elegiac tributes to John Dryden published shortly after his death in 1700. A collection of her poems was published three years later.

Little is known about the later part of her life.

[edit] Publications

• Female Advocate or, an Answer to a Late Satyr Against the Pride, Lust and Inconstancy, c. of Woman. Written by a Lady in Vindication of her Sex (1686)
• Poems on Several Occasions (1703)

[edit] E-texts

• Female Advocate or, an Answer to a Late Satyr Against the Pride, Lust and Inconstancy, &c. of Woman. Written by a Lady in Vindication of her Sex (Women Writers Resource Project)
• "The Emulation" (Representative Poetry Online [RPO])
• "The Repulse to Alcander" (RPO)
• "To Philaster" (RPO)

[edit] References

• Greene, Richard. “Egerton , Sarah (1670–1723).” Rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 7 Dec. 2006.