Sarah Green

Sarah Green (fl. 1790 – 1825) was an Irish-English author, one of the ten most prolific novelists of the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

Green was probably born in Ireland and then later moved to London. Very little is known of her aside from what has been pieced together of her publishing history. She produced works in an array of genres: novels, tales, romances, and, notably, like Jane Austen, mock-romances. She also wrote at least one religious work, as well as conduct literature, a translation, and editing work. Eight of her works were published with the popular Minerva Press by William Lane or his successor, Anthony Newman. "It is ironic," one commentator has written, that her moral tract, Mental improvement for a young lady (1793) "condemns all novels save those of Fanny Burney." Later works, however, engage with a range of other writers: in Scotch Novel Reading (1824), in addition to Burney, Green variously refers to or evokes Lord Byron, Charlotte Dacre, Charlotte Lennox, Sydney Owenson, Ann Radcliffe, and Walter Scott. Her Private History of the Court of England (privately printed, 1808) is a fictionalized account of the life of writer Mary Robinson.

Initially Green published anonymously, but after 1810 she began to publish under her own name.

She is one of the "lost" women writers listed by Dale Spender in Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen.