Literary history has tended to underplay the comic and the humorous in eighteenth-century women’s writing. While Restoration women wits are granted some licence to amuse, and late-eighteenth- century authors such as Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and the caustic Jane Austen are admitted as decorous representatives of ‘comic feminism’, both scholarship and university curricula conspire to consign the women novelists of mid-century to a dull didacticism. Women writers associated with Samuel Richardson tended to be regarded, like him, as didactic or sentimental, rather than amusing or (heaven forbid) funny. Sarah Fielding, author of The Governess: or, The Little Female Academy (1749), has long been recognised as an educational writer. But Fielding’s work is also distinguished by a singular sense of humour. Fielding’s witty satires ironise and calibrate moral actions and mental thoughts; her fictions activate and reform their readers–educating through fable, allegory, anecdote and droll commentary. Though sometimes characterised as a mid-century modification of Augustan satire, a ‘calm and subdued’ form which ‘involves self-doubt’ in its efforts to instruct and improve readers, Fielding’s humour can also be sceptical, caustic and even crude. With her collaborator, the irreverent satirist Jane Collier, Fielding planned a work entitled The Laugh, designed as a companion piece to their experimental prose work The Cry (1754). Both works aim to ‘laugh [readers] out of […] absurdities’, educating through amusement, drollery and fun. In contrast to the baleful critical commonplace of the downtrodden woman writer, Fielding displays a trenchant sense of humour in the face of gendered adversity – a keen grasp of the ridiculous equal to that of her rambunctious male peers. Such qualities would have been essential for withstanding what is increasingly conceptualised as an unsentimental eighteenth century: nasty, brutish and long.

This chapter argues that by focusing on the sombre, grave and serious aspects of the educational mode, critics have missed its comic strains, and ignored the instructive power of mirth in women’s writing. I explore the ways in which Sarah Fielding uses humour to educate and reform her readers, and to inform them about their relative powerlessness in the world. Though The Governess is the most explicitly didactic of Fielding’s works, her entire corpus uses ‘narrative techniques, episodes, and themes all directed towards moral education’.