The details of Sarah (Robinson) Scott's private life are becoming increasingly familiar. Born in 1723 to an established Yorkshire family, Sarah Robinson began writing at an early age; her sister, with whom she was close, was the famous "bluestocking" Elizabeth Montague; in 1748, she met Lady Barbara Montague (no relation to her sister), the daughter of the first earl of Halifax and his wife Lady Mary Lumley, with whom she maintained an intimate relation until Lady Barbara's death in 1765.

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In 1751, Sarah Robinson married George Lewis Scott, and she separated from him in 1752. Her first novel, The History of Cornelia, appeared in 1750. Between 1750 and her death in 1795, Sarah Scott published four more novels and three histories.

Millenium Hall (1762) was her most popular work. Millenium Hall attempts to challenge the "sex-gender system" by working within the structure of exemplary narratives, such as were popular in midcentury, to offer an alternative to male-oriented interpretations of female sexual power.

In doing so, Scott challenges as well our conceptions of female sexuality in the eighteenth century and our preconceptions concerning female-female relations within that extraordinarily imprecise category of "romantic friendship," which flourished throughout the later eighteenth century.

In Millenium Hall, Scott offers a narrative form that challenges patriarchy with the tales of a group of women who remain at the end of their romantic adventures "happily unmarried." Although nominally written as a letter from "a gentleman on his travels," the novel establishes an elaborate strategy to resist the authority of the patriarchal narrative voice.

Scott's seemingly crude arrangement of internal
narration--the novel consists of a series of tales told by or about the inhabitants of Millenium Hall--represents the most obvious of her techniques: The tales create a female subject position within the text in order to undermine the "romance plot" that was already strong enough to determine popular expectation. By challenging the conventions of romantic narrative, Scott is able to reconceive their ideological range.

In her personal life, Sarah Scott found an alternative to the ruthlessly limited possibilities available to women in the eighteenth century. In this novel, she dramatizes this discovery in a way that claims narrative authority for women loving women and offers women in general an escape from the prison-house of patriarchal narrative.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, intimate, exclusive, and often erotic romantic friendships between women were largely perceived as normal and socially acceptable.