With its flamboyant use of scandal and bold exploration of sexual morality, Sarah Green's The Private History of the Court of England (1808) initially met with divided but impassioned critical reaction. A generically experimental mix of political satire, secret history and sexual exposé, the work was, according to Flowers of Literature (1808–9), an ‘ingenious satire’. Less favourably, the Monthly Review suggested it was reprehensible if trivial, catering to ‘the vulgar thirst after fashionable anecdote’. Most seriously of all, the conservative Critical Review saw it as a ‘sign of great depravity of manners’ because it ‘expose[d] vices and errors which all true patriots would rather wish to be concealed’. Rather than seeing the novel as an attack on aristocratic immorality meant to improve British society, this reviewer implies it is a danger to national solidarity – a danger that would have seemed particularly acute because of Britain's engagement in the Napoleonic Wars. Such anxiety stems from the fact that while The Private History claimed to be an account of the domestic life of Edward IV (1442–83), during the reign of Henry VI (1421–71), it actually tells the story of a Hanoverian monarchy dangerously divided. In this at times quite direct satire, the corruption Green associated with the Prince of Wales, later King George IV (1762–1830), and the Whig followers of Charles Fox (1749–1806), is exposed in a plea for a more responsible ruling class. The alternative to such reform, as Green sees it, is the potentially disastrous moral decline of the English people.

In writing this undoubtedly controversial if sensational work, Green created something unique among her diverse and occasionally contentious oeuvre. Some fifteen novels can be attributed to her with confidence – one, The Reformist, of supposedly such ‘great illiberality’ that the Monthly Review was reluctant to ‘attribute [it] to a female pen’. Yet while The Private History shares some of the most entertaining aspects of her other work, its blend of politics, satire, sex and history makes it distinct from her literary satires (including her 1810 Romance Readers and Romance Writers); her novels of fashionable marriage; and her attempts at Radcliffean Gothic.