Sarah Chapone (11 December 1699 – 24 February 1764), born Sarah Kirkham and often referred to as Mrs Chapone,^{[lower-alpha 1]} was an English legal theorist, pamphleteer, and prolific letter writer. She is best known for the treatise The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives, published anonymously in 1735.

Chapone lived and wrote in mid-18th-century England. At home, the period, known as the Georgian era, was marked by the dominance of Robert Walpole in Parliament. Abroad, military conflict between France and England was constant, until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763—one year before Chapone's death.^[1]

Chapone was born in 1699 to Damaris and the Reverend Lionel Kirkham,^[11] to a family largely of Anglican clergy.^[10] She was raised in her father's rectory in Stanton, Gloucestershire, then quite a remote area.^[12] She married Reverend John Chapone in 1725.^[13] John Wesley, the Anglican theologian, had courted her; they later became friends and correspondents.^[14] For nine years after her marriage, she operated a boarding school while raising five children.^[13] Money was short, and the family moved frequently, until John became vicar of Badgeworth in 1745.^[15][16]

Chapone was close with Mary Delany from 1715 (when Chapone was 16 and Delany 15) onwards.^[13][17][18] In her autobiography, Delany describes Chapone, whom she nicknamed Sappho:^{[lower-alpha 2]}

She had an uncommon genius and intrepid spirit, which though really innocent, alarmed my father, and made him uneasy at my great attachment to her. … She entertained me with her wit, and she flattered me with her approbation, but by the improvements she has since made, I see she was not, at my first acquaintance, the perfect creature I thought her then... Her extraordinary understanding, lively imagination and human disposition, which soon became conspicuous, at last reconciled my father to her, and he never after debarred me the pleasure of seeing her ...^[19]

Eaves and Kimpel, in their monumental biography of Samuel Richardson, describe Chapone as 'moralistic',^[20] 'pious, earnest, verbose, and rather gushing'.^[21] Orr calls her 'vivacious'.^[14]

Chapone's friends and correspondents included George Ballard and Samuel Richardson.^[18] She reviewed Ballard's manuscripts of Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752), his biographical encyclopedia of women, and helped him find financial support for the project.^[11][22] Chapone also introduced Ballard to the works of Mary Astell,^[23] whom she had read for many years.^[24] Together, Chapone and Ballard worked to find Elizabeth Elstob, who by the 1730s was living in poverty, financial assistance and a better living situation.^[25][26]

Chapone struck up a correspondence with Richardson in 1750.^[21] Their relationship was 'almost purely epistolary'.^[21] Richardson had a high regard for Chapone,^[27] calling her 'a great Championess for her Sex'.^[23] In their numerous letters, they discuss Richardson's novel Clarissa and Chapone's views about the place of women in society.

Chapone objected to certain elements of Clarissa in her letters to Richardson. Eaves and Kimpel note that 'Mrs. Chapone … though generally admiring [of Clarissa], found the heroine short of her feminist ideal—she is too submissive to her father'.^[28] She argued that Clarissa ought to have sought legal remedies against her father Mr Harlowe, who forces her to marry Robert Solmes against her will.^{[29][lower-alpha 3]}

As quoted in a letter of Richardson to Chapone, Chapone wrote:

A Parent is doubtless at Liberty to with-hold his Substance from a Child who at any Age, shall marry against his Consent … But he has no Authority to compel or command a Child at any Age to marry against his or her own.^[30]