Sarah Fyge Egerton

In her works The Female Advocate and Poems on Several Occasions, Egerton wrote about gender, friendship, marriage, religion, education, politics, and other topics.

[1] Fyge, in addition to being an apothecary in London, was a descendant of the Figge family of Winslow, Buckinghamshire, from which he inherited a plot of land.

Based on her family's wealth and references found within her works, it appears that she had some education, whether formal or informal, in fields such as mythology, philosophy, and geography.

[2] The Female Advocate is a poem written in response to Robert Gould's Love Given O'er: Or a Satyr on the Inconstancy of Woman, which accuses women of being a source of evil.

[2] Upon the publication of a second edition of The Female Advocate, Thomas Fyge banished his daughter from their London home, and she went to live with family members in Winslow, Buckinghamshire.

[5] By 1709, Manley openly criticised Egerton and her second marriage in The New Atalantis with lines like, "Her face protects her chastity," and a scene featuring a violent fight during which Sarah threw a pie at her husband.

[9] Egerton first entered the literary world with her publication of The Female Advocate (1686), a defiant response to Robert Gould's Love Given O're: Or, A Satyr Against the Pride, Lust and Inconstancy of Women (1682).

She responds to Gould's misogynistic endeavours to, "Discover all their [women] various sorts of vice,/The Rules by which they ruine and intice,/Their folly, Falshood, lux'ry, Lust, and Pride."

Her reply in heroic couplets not only challenges the merit of his claim, but goes farther to suggest that women are in fact the superior sex because, when found alone, man is "A barren Sex and insignificant" and "So Heaven made Woman to supply the want,/And to make perfect what before was scant"[8] Egerton also argued that it was the same God that created both men and women, and in doing so applied generally accepted theological points to counter Gould's argument.

[10] "Emulation" is a thirty nine-line poem written in heroic couplets that challenges the "tyrant Custom" that makes females "in every state a slave" (4).

She believes that men deliberately place women in such roles to prevent females from receiving educations, because males "fear [that] we should excel their sluggish parts,/Should we attempt the science and arts" (19–20).

"To Marina", written in heroic couplets, is a complaint against a woman that spoke against progressive female attitudes—a recurrent argumentative stance amongst Egerton's group of peers.

[12] The poem expresses frustration with the educational system that inculcates customs designed to reflect adherence to proper form rather than intellectual knowledge.