Sarah Fyge Egerton (1670–1723)

Sarah Fyge grew up in comfortable circumstances as the daughter of a London apothecary who was also a landowner. She studied philosophy, geography, mythology, and other subjects. She would later recall in “On my leaving London” that she was forced by her father to move to Winslow following the publication of her 1686 work The Female Advocate. Her father arranged her first marriage to Edward Field, an attorney who died shortly afterwards, some time before 1700. In 1703, Sarah published Poems on Several Occasions, signed S.F.E., indicating that between 1700 and 1703 she had married her much-older second cousin, the Reverend Thomas Egerton. The marriage was unhappy and it appears that the couple filed for divorce the same year. Few, if any, other references can be found about Sarah Fyge Egerton except for the inscription of her name on her husband’s burial monument in 1720, and the record of her own death in 1723. Much of Sarah’s work appears to have been passed among a group of female poets as she indicated in her dedication to the Earl of Halifax in Poems on Several Occasions, “They [her poems] never were abroad before, nor e’er seen but by my own sex, some of which have favour’d me with their compliments.”

Sarah Fyge Egerton was a 17th-century female poet. The attribution of "Gene Stratton-Porter: A Little Story of The Life and Work and Ideals of 'The Bird Woman'" to her is an error on the part of Amazon; that editor should be Eugene Francis Saxton (1884-1943).