Sarah+Stickney+Ellis

There are few biographical facts of Sarah Stickney Ellis present in her multitude of conduct books, novels, and poetry volumes etc., and this enabled Ellis to construct a didactic and morally based literary persona for the public of her time. Unlike many other Victorian authors Ellis’s did not compose her own memoir. H.S. Twycross Martin accounts from the //Oxford Dictionary of National Biography// on the details of Ellis’s life from // The Home Life and Letters of Mrs. Ellis Compiled by her Nieces ( // 1893//)//. Portrait of Sarah Stickney Ellis (Wikimedia Commons)

Conceived at the turn of the eighteenth century near Holderness, Yorkshire, Ellis was born to William and Esther Stickney. Ellis’s father, “a man of scientific interests and patriarchal authority” (Twycross-Martin), instilled Sarah with a strong moral base developed in part at home, as well at a “Quaker school [in] Ackworth between 1814 and 1816” (Twycross-Martin). Although her family was in “comfortable circumstance” (Twycross-Martin) Ellis helped raise her four siblings and learned “practical housewifery” (Twycross-Martin) at an early age. Ellis’s involvement in the domestic sphere was equal to the freedom experienced in girlhood to which she was “encouraged to read widely in literature [and] ride and train her own horses” (Twycross-Martin). Eventually the financial destitution her family faced during the 1820s resolved Ellis to support her family by “writing little books and painting for money” (Twycross-Martin). The loss of Ellis’s mother at a young age influenced her desire to assert the importance of fulfilling a matriarchal role seen in the moral themes and domestic settings reflected in her fiction. Ellis, however; she portrayed herself, was no ordinary woman, she was a writer, educator and social reformer of her period.

Among her earliest titles: //Contrasts// a book of illustrations, // The Negro Slave: a Tale Addressed to the Women of Great Britain // inspired by the anti-slavery movement, //The Poetry of Life,// and her first three-volume novel //Home, or, The Iron Rule// established Ellis’s authorial vocation prior to marriage. On May 23 1837 Sarah Stickney married widower and Congregationalist minister, missionary and author William Ellis. Ellis readily adopted William’s four children, converted from being a Quaker to a Congregationalist, and became a supporter of the temperance movement which helped to dissuade the influence of alcoholism among all classes in Victorian Britain. Between 1831 and 1931 temperance awareness increased thanks to propaganda initiated by organizations such as the British Association for the Promotion of Temperance (1835), and in part with “ growing respectability, improved amenities, more comfortable homes, and a decline in occupations of heavy labour where drink was a necessity” (Canon). Involvement with the temperance movement, and missionary work lead Ellis to publish on these subjects, she wrote as well on “accounts of travel […] a book on cookery and household management” (Twycross-Martin). More importantly Ellis’s literary career of thirty years popularized a form of moral and didactic fiction entitled “conduct-books” (Twycross-Martin).

To situate the middle-class ideology of Ellis’s fiction within the context of the Victorian period, it is important to note the gendered spheres of activity that attributed men within the active masculine sphere of the political and social world. Women, on the other hand, were ensconced into the domestic sphere in which they were expected to rear children, manage households, and act as dutiful and morally exemplary wives. It was this realm of influence that Ellis used her conduct-book series //The Women of England// including: // Daughter of England, their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities; The Wives of England, their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations, The Mothers of England, their Influence and Responsibility, // to promote separate-sphere ideology. At the age of forty Ellis continued the //Women of England// series with the title //The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits// from which Mary Elizabeth Leighton quotes in // The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose 1832-1901 Ellis saying //“The sphere of woman’s happiest and most beneficial influence is a domestic one” (289).

Throughout //The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits// Ellis uses modest, non-threatening and subservient language such as “kindness” “gentleness” “amiable” “noble-minded” (Leighton 289) to humble women-kind and herself to the reader. This serves to educate female readers on acceptable forms of manner and speech which suggests that conduct books, while aimed at women, were also seen by men as suitable literature for the women in their lives. Furthermore Ellis appropriates her narrative as that of and educator one who as “a writer […] must be painfully sensible of her own deficiency in sympathy of feeling, she is perhaps the better qualified to address the weakest of her sex” (Leighton 290). The emotional and feminine deficiency of women is metaphorically symbolized as a “lovely blossom” (Leighton 289), women “some fragrant flower, created only to bloom, and exhale in sweets” (Leighton 289). Ellis comments further that many Victorian writers grossly exaggerate these qualities when they should endear a woman to domestic tasks that “spend her mental and moral capabilities in devising means for promoting the happiness of others, while her own derives a remote and secondary existence from theirs” (Leighton 289). Secondly Ellis asserts “women possess more moral power than men” (Leighton 291), and thus they must assert themselves as an example that reminds their husbands to stay the moral highroad.

To Ellis the missing mother figure in her life and missionary domesticity influenced how she functioned as an educator at both the “non-denominational school for girls, Rawdon House School” (Twycross-Martin) and within the public as a writer and editor to a number of volumes such as // The Morning Call: a Table-Book of Literature and Art //. Ellis’s conduct-books institutionalized her beliefs as a dominant standard within society. These books caused writers such as George Eliot, and Douglas Jerrold to satirize Ellis’s work, one such series is Jerrold’s “Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures”. William Makepeace Thackeray who “contributed a series of jokes at her expense” (Twycross-Martin) in //Punch// suggested her conduct books “manipulate[d] men” (Twycross-Martin). Ellis’s conduct books later instigated a counter argument to Ellis’s ideologies that proved women did not desire to reside permanently within the domestic sphere. The woman question (or the women’s right to vote and own property) brought into light the business attitude held by Ellis who operated as a public figure outside the home while promoting women to function within the domestic sphere. MM/Engl387/Fall2014/UVic

Works Cited Cannon, John. "Temperance movement." //A Dictionary of British History//. Online. 27 Oct. 2014

Ellis-Stickney, Sarah. From, //The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits// (1839). //The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose 1832-1901.// Ed. Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2012. 288-292. Print.

Leighton, Mary Elizabeth and Lisa Surridge, eds. //The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose1832-1901.// Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2012. Print.

Twycross-Martin, H. S. “Ellis, Sarah (1799–1872).” //Oxford Dictionary of National Biography//. Online. 27 Oct. 2014