Editing Sarah Fielding (section)

==Childhood==
Sarah Fielding was born at [[East Stour, Dorset]] in 1710 to Edmund Feilding ''[sic]'' and his wife Sarah, ''née'' Gould (died 1718),<ref name="Feminist" >''The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present'', Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, eds (London, Batsford, 1990), pp. 370–371.</ref> after [[Henry Fielding|Henry]] and Ursula; her younger siblings were Anne, Beatrice, and Edmund. Sarah's father, Edmund, the third son of John Feilding, was a military officer and relative of the [[Earl of Denbigh|Earls of Denbigh]] (his father, John, had been the youngest son of the 3rd Earl). Although Edmund spelled his last name "Feilding" as often as "Fielding," both Henry and Sarah spelled the name "Fielding." When asked by an Earl of Denbigh why, Henry Fielding said, "I cannot tell, my Lord, except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to spell".<ref>Battestin 7–8.</ref> Sarah Fielding's mother, Sarah Gould, was the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a judge on the King's Bench who had been reappointed to the [[Queen Anne of Great Britain|Queen's]] Bench. This descent is important for understanding the early life and education of Edmund Feilding's children.

Edmund left the care of his children to his wife's mother, Lady Sarah Gould, while he built his career in London. The children grew up in her home in [[Glastonbury]] and their paternal grandfather's house in East Stour (John Feilding being a [[latitudinarianism|latitudinarian]] [[Cambridge University|Cambridge-educated]] [[priest|parish priest]] with three livings, who had been considered for a bishopric in Ireland.<ref>Battestin 10.</ref> Henry was sent to [[Eton College|Eton]], but all of the daughters were sent to Mary Rookes's boarding school in [[Salisbury]]. This was "non-academic, but she was later extremely well read in Greek, Latin, French and English."<ref name="Feminist" />

When Edmund's first wife (Fielding's mother) died in 1718, Edmund married Anne Rapha, a [[Roman Catholic]] widow, who brought with her several children, and later bore Edmund a son and half-brother for Henry and Sarah, the future reformer [[John Fielding]]. Sir Henry and Lady Sarah Gould (Fielding's maternal grandparents) had fallen out with Edmund before the death of the children's mother. Lady Gould was highly displeased with Edmund's second marriage, and Anne Fielding (née Rapha) was the subject of much anti-Catholic sentiment from the elder generation of the family. Lady Gould was so set against Anne and her enlargement to the family that, in 1721, she sued for custody of the children and ownership of the family house in East Stour. She eventually won, leaving the children unable to see their father for some years.