Author: Renou, Sarah
Biography:
RENOU, Sarah (b 1784-d after 1849: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born in Shoreditch, London, to Sarah (Colicut) and William Renou. Her brother, William (b 1794), was a surgeon and author of Practical Observations on Stricture; her Temple of Truth is dedicated to him. The family was of Huguenot descent, and her uncle, Captain Adrian Renou of the Royal Navy, fought and was killed in the Napoleonic Wars. She was well-educated and tried to make a living as a teacher; all of her works are didactic and some are directed at young people. The preface to the first edition of Temple of Truth is dated from 3 Springfield Place [Lansdowne Road], Bath; that to the second edition is from Edinburgh. Both she and her brother have files in the Royal Literary Fund archives but the one for William is an application that Sarah made in 1836 on his behalf. She first wrote to the RLF in Dec. 1825 saying that she was sole support for a family member at the York Asylum. This was William who evidently spent many years at the Asylum and likely died there. Subsequent letters detail her precarious financial situation, planned works (she laboured on a never-completed multi-volume work on female education for which Sherwood and Co. paid her £277 8s. in advance), and her 1828 incarceration in the debtors’ prison on Whitecross Street. In 1818 and 1826 she advertised the forthcoming establishment of schools for girls, first in Bath on Lansdowne Road and then in London at Goodman’s Fields; it is not known if the schools ever actually opened. She likely also spent time in Bristol. In the 1840s she went to France, possibly to escape debt, and her final letter to the Fund is dated from there in 1849 when her hopes of benefiting from the will of a deceased relation had fallen through. No trace of her has been found after that date. Her known other works are Village Conversations or the Vicar’s Fireside (dedicated to Hannah More: vol. 1, 1815; vol. 2, 1816; 2nd edition, 1817 with subscribers’ list including her brother’s name), and a three-volume novel, The Ionian (1824). However, a letter to the RLF lists additional works not previously recognised as by her: Montalvyn the Benevolent Patriot (a verse play in five acts: 1823), Sketch of a Plan for the Suppression of Mendicity (1823), and Impartial and Philosophical Strictures on Parliamentary Reform; the Liberty of the Press; and the Criminal Jurisprudence of England (1823). Her letter states that she contributed articles to the three volumes of The Emporium of Literature, Science, and Belles Lettres (1831) and wrote The New Politique or Vista of Futurity (not traced). In 1838 she published Delineations Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Exemplifying the Philosophy of Christianity (dedicated to Queen Victoria and published as “The Christian Philosopher’s New Year Gift for 1838”). (ancestry.co.uk 30 Aug. 2020; findmypast.co.uk 30 Aug. 2020; RLF files 551, 868; personal correspondence with Cornell University librarian)