page_title: Sarah Chapone
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Sarah Chapone / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: St Michael and All Angels, Stanton, Gloucestershire.
context_page_description: Sarah Chapone, born Sarah Kirkham and often referred to as Mrs Chapone, 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.
context_section_description: Chapone was born in 1699 to Damaris and the Reverend Lionel Kirkham, to a family largely of Anglican clergy. She was raised in her father's rectory in Stanton, Gloucestershire, then quite a remote area. She married Reverend John Chapone in 1725. John Wesley, the Anglican theologian, had courted her; they later became friends and correspondents. For nine years after her marriage, she operated a boarding school while raising five children. Money was short, and the family moved frequently, until John became vicar of Badgeworth in 1745.
  
  Chapone was close with Mary Delany from 1715 (when Chapone was 16 and Delany 15) onwards. In her autobiography, Delany describes Chapone, whom she nicknamed Sappho:
  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 ...
  Eaves and Kimpel, in their monumental biography of Samuel Richardson, describe Chapone as 'moralistic', 'pious, earnest, verbose, and rather gushing'. Orr calls her 'vivacious'.
caption: Church of St Michael and All Angels in Stanton. Chapone spent much of her life in Stanton and came from a family of Anglican clergy.
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