Author: Renou, Sarah
Biography:
RENOU, Sarah (b 1784-d after 1849: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 2 Oct. 1784 at Charles Square, Shoreditch, London, to Sarah (Colicut) and William Renou, a clothmaker. She was baptised at St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, on 30 Oct. One brother, William (b 1794), was a surgeon and author of Practical Observations on Stricture; another brother, Timothy (b 1789), was a naval lieutenant. 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 sought to work 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, Bath; that to the second edition is from Edinburgh. Both she and her brother have files in the RLF archives. 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 (a never-completed multi-volume work on female education for which Sherwood and Co. paid her £277 8s.), and her 1828 incarceration in debtors’ prison. In 1818 she advertised the forthcoming establishment of a school for girls in Bath on Lansdowne Road. In 1826 she advertised a school in London at Goodman’s Fields. She likely also spent time in Bristol. In the 1840s she went to France and her final letter to the Fund is dated from there in 1849. No trace of her has been found after that date. Her known other works are Village Conversations or the Vicar’s Fireside and a three-volume novel, The Ionian (1824). A letter to the RLF lists additional works: Montalvyn (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 (1823). 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. (ancestry.co.uk 30 Aug. 2020, 26 Sept. 2025; findmypast.co.uk 30 Aug. 2020; Bath Journal 10 Jan. 1820; RLF files 551, 868; personal correspondence with Cornell University librarian) SR