[2] Her depictions of domesticity and ties with India may have influenced many young readers,[3] but her work fell from favour as children's literature broadened in the late nineteenth century.

And yet I was a very happy child, and when relieved from my collars I not unseldom manifested my delight by starting from our hall-door and taking a run for half a mile through the woods.Sherwood's and her sister Lucy Lyttelton's education was wide-ranging for girls in the late eighteenth century: Sherwood learnt Latin and Greek and was allowed to read freely in her father's library.

[7] Sherwood states in her autobiography that by the age of thirteen, she had reached her full height, but her mother continued to dress her like a child, so she hid in the woods with a book and a doll.

[1][13] When Sherwood's father died in 1795, her family retired from active social life, since her mother preferred seclusion, and moved to Bridgnorth, Shropshire,[14][15] into "a somewhat uncomfortable house" in the town's High Street.

[1] The Sherwoods stayed in India for eleven years, moving with the army and a growing family from Calcutta (Kolkata) to Dinapore (Danapur), Berhampore (Baharampur), Cawnpore (Kanpur) and Meerut.

The missionary Henry Martyn (after whom she had named her sixth child) finally convinced her, but it was the chaplain to the company who first made her aware of her "human depravity" and need for redemption.

[23] Sherwood discovered that traditional British teaching materials did not appeal to children raised in India and so wrote her own Indian and army-themed stories, such as The History of Little Henry and his Bearer (1814) and The Memoirs of Sergeant Dale, his Daughter and the Orphan Mary (1815).

Relying on her fame as an author and her teaching experience in India, Sherwood decided to establish a boarding school for girls in Wick; it remained in operation for eight years.

The History of Henry Milner (1822) was one of Sherwood's most successful books; children sent her fan mail, begging her to write a sequel; one child sent her "ornamental pens" with which to do so.

This novel, which children's literature scholar Patricia Demers, describes as a "purified Pamela",[35] tells the story of Susan, an orphaned servant girl who "resists the advances of a philandering soldier; though trembling with emotion at the man's declaration of love and promise of marriage".

Henry Milner was written in response to Thomas Day's The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–1789), a novel founded on the philosophy of Rousseau (whose writings Sherwood had lambasted as "the well-spring of infidelity").

[30] The children's literature scholar Janis Dawson indicates that the structure and emphasis of Henry much resemble Rousseau's Emile (1762): their pedagogies are similar, even if their underlying assumptions about childhood conflict.

[40] According to Demers, "some young readers may have found [In-bred Sin's] activities more interesting than the spiritual struggles of the little heroes, reading the book as an adventure story rather than as a guide to salvation".

[39] Sherwood infused her works with political and social messages dear to evangelicals in the 1810s and 1820s, such as the crucial role of missions, the value of charity, the evils of slavery, and the need for Sabbath observance.

[42][43] As Cutt argues, "the great overriding metaphor of all [Sherwood's] work is the representation of divine order by the harmonious family relationship (inevitably set in its own pastoral Eden). ...

[47] The faithful and "true" Charles has a transcendent deathbed experience, suggesting he is saved; by contrast, the heedless, disobedient Augusta burns up while playing with candles and is presumably damned.

[47] Unlike previous allegorical literature with these themes, such as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Sherwood domesticated her story with actions in the children's day-to-day lives, such as stealing fruit.

[48] Each chapter includes thematically linked prayers and hymns, by Philip Doddridge, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, William Cowper, Ann and Jane Taylor, and others.

[48] Dickensian scholar Lois E. Chaney has suggested that it "influenced Dickens's depictions of Pip's fears of the convict, the gibbet, and 'the horrible young man' at the close of Chapter 1" in Great Expectations (1860–1861).

[57] Emphasizing individual experience and one's personal relationship with God, they discouraged readers from attributing their successes or failures to "larger economic and political forces".

As Linda Peterson, a scholar of nineteenth-century women's literature, argues, Sherwood's tracts use a Biblical "interpretative frame" to highlight the fleetingness of earthly things.

Her most popular, The History of Little Henry and his Bearer (1814), tells of a young British boy who, on his deathbed, converts Boosy, the Indian man who has taken care of him throughout his childhood.

[64] The Indian Pilgrim (1818) demonstrates Sherwood's religious biases: "Muslims and Jews receive better treatment than Hindus because of their belief in one God, but Roman Catholics fare little better than the Hindu idolaters.

According to Cutt, Sherwood's depictions of India were among the few available to young British readers; such children "acquired a strong conviction of the rightness of missions, which, while it inculcated sincere concern for, and a genuine kindness towards an alien people for whom Britain was responsible, quite destroyed any latent respect for Indian tradition.

She argues that Sherwood's evangelical stories demonstrate the deep colonial "mistrust of feminized agency", represented by a dying child in Little Henry and his Bearer.

[70] In 1835, she wrote a Gothic novel for adolescents entitled Shanty the Blacksmith, which Cutt calls "a gripping [and] exciting tale"[71] and employs the tropes of the genre: "lost heir, ruined castle, humble helpers and faithful retainer, sinister and mysterious gypsies, prisoner and plot".

It follows her progress from a flighty, discontented girl to a reliable, content woman; she learns to accommodate herself to the whims of a proud nobility, silly literati, and dogmatic evangelicals.

[31] In the United States, Sherwood's early works were popular and republished well into the 1840s; thereafter a tradition of specifically American children's literature began to develop with authors such as Louisa May Alcott.

[75] The prevalence of death in Sherwood's early stories and vivid portrayal of its worldly and otherworldly consequences have often caused twentieth-century critics to deride her works.

[78][79] Due to the popularity of Sherwood's works and their impact on later writers, Janis Dawson writes: "Though her books are no longer widely read, she is regarded as one of the most significant authors of children's literature of the nineteenth century".