Egerton, Sarah Fyge

(1670-1723)

   Born in London, one of the six daughters of a physician, she wrote her most important feminist poem, "The Female Advocate," at the age of fourteen. An expanded edition was published in 1687 and again in 1707. Her father, objecting to her poetry, sent her to relatives in Shenley, Buckinghamshire, around 1687, then she was forced into marriage with Edward Field, an attorney who died in the mid-1690s, leaving her well-off. Her later poems talk about the growing love between her and Field and her grief at his death. She then married her second cousin, the Reverend Thomas Egerton, a much older widower with grown children. By 1703 the two were embroiled in a suit and counter-suit for divorce, but remained married until he died in 1720. Poems on Several Occasions was published in 1703, with a second edition in 1706. Some of her other poems: "On My Leaving London, June the 29," "On My Wedding Day," "Repulse to Alcander," "The Emulation," "To Marina," "To One Who Said I Must Not Love," "To Orabella, Marry'd to an Old Man," "To Philaster."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Early Modern Women Poets (1520-1700). Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, ed. Oxford University Press, 2001. Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Roger Lonsdale, ed. Oxford University Press, 1989. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Poetry by English Women: Elizabethan to Victorian, R.E. Pritchard, ed. Continuum, 1990. Sarah Fyge Field Egerton (http://www.pinn.net/Egerton, Sarah Fygesunshine/whm2000/eger2.html). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org).