Parenting & Family Quote by Sarah Fielding

Fielding skewers a particularly Enlightenment-era vanity: the belief that emotional stamina is a private achievement, like a muscle you can brag about because it performs on command. The sentence begins with self-flattery dressed up as reflection, "I fancied", a word that quietly confesses self-deception. Constancy of mind sounds like the prized moral technology of the period, the polished restraint associated with reason, virtue, and social competence. She claims she "could bear my own sufferings" - a stoic credential that reads almost like a test passed.

Then the quote pivots, not into melodrama but into exposure. "But found through the sufferings of others" shifts the ground from self-management to relational ethics. Pain you can narrate as yours can be organized, contained, even aestheticized. Another person's pain is messy, unpredictable, and morally demanding. It insists you admit dependency: your feelings are not sovereign territory.

The kicker is "weakened like a child". Fielding doesn't romanticize empathy; she infantilizes the adult self that thought it was in control. The subtext is sharp: maturity, as the culture defined it, often meant emotional discipline that could shade into emotional selfishness. Real vulnerability arrives when your defenses don't protect you from being moved.

Context matters: Fielding wrote in a century obsessed with sensibility and moral feeling, especially in fiction. She anticipates the novel's argument that sympathy is not a decorative virtue but a destabilizing force - one that punctures the ego and rewrites what "strength" is supposed to mean.