Jane Collier

Jane Collier (1714 – March 1755) was an English novelist best known for her book An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. She also collaborated with Sarah Fielding on her only other surviving work The Cry (1754).

Personal life Collier was baptized on 16 January 1715 in Wiltshire, the daughter of philosopher and clergyman Arthur Collier, and Margaret Johnson. She had two brothers and one sister.

In 1732, her father died and Jane Collier (then 17), along with her sister Margaret Collier (then 15), were left without anyone to provide for them. A year later, in 1749, the Colliers' mother died.

Collier never married, possibly because she could not offer a sufficient dowry, or possibly because, like Sarah Fielding, she hoped to establish an independent living through her writing. In 1748, Richardson was using Collier as a go between with Sarah Fielding in order to help the two write. In 1753, she wrote The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting with the help of Sarah Fielding and possibly James Harris or Samuel Richardson. Afterwards, it was Richardson who printed the work. Before she died, she planned a sequel to The Cry, describing it as "A book called The Laugh on the same plan as The Cry". Richardson urged Fielding to revise The Cry just two years later. She is one of the many female 18th-century authors (including Frances Burney, Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, and Charlotte Smith) who experimented with "alternative models for relationships, for different ways of regarding others and even for ameliorating society."

As a sign of his favour for Collier's style, satiric humor, and classical learning, Henry Fielding wrote in the beginning of an edition of Horace: To Miss Jane Collyer, This Edition of the best of all the Roman Poets, as a Memorial (however poor) of the highest Esteem for an Understanding more than Female, mixed with virtues almost more than human, gives, offers up and dedicates her Sincere Friend Henry Fielding This was one of the last works that Fielding would write because he left that evening on a trip to Lisbon where he died two months later.

List of works An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753). A social satire that was originally published anonymously and sold well, with ten editions being published between 1753 and 1811. The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754), by Collier and Sarah Fielding. A complex work describing the struggle of its heroines against the 'spiteful and malicious tongues' of an unprincipled society.