The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia

Sarah Fielding and Christopher D. Johnson (Ed.)

1994
200 pages
$78.00
ISBN 0838752578

This edition provides a fully annotated text of Sarah Fielding's The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia based on the first edition of 1757. It records Fielding's use of Greek and Roman writers--particularly Plutarch, Dio Cassius, Appian, Suetonius, and Josephus--eighteenth-century historians, and Renaissance and Restoration playwrights. Christopher D. Johnson, in the introduction, discusses the printing, publication, and reception of the Lives, suggests its relation to eighteenth-century biographies, places it in a broader context of narrative writing, and considers Fielding's depiction of gender roles. The variants between the first and second editions of Fielding's work are listed, too, and full bibliographic descriptions are supplied.

The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia was Sarah Fielding's complete work. It appeared thirteen years after Fielding established her literary reputation with her two-volume episodic novel, The Adventures of David Simple, and eight years after she published The Governess. In writing The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, Fielding moved away from pure fiction and toward a uniquely imaginative form of biography. Set in the first century B.C., the Lives presents the stories of two famous women, each of whom played an important role in Roman history during the turbulent period of civil war immediately before the Golden Age of Augustus Caesar.

About the authors:

Christopher D. Johnson is Assistant Professor of English at Missouri Valley College .