Frances Sheridan

01 January 1724 - 26 August 1766

Standard Name: Sheridan, Frances

Birth Name: Frances Chamberlaine

Married Name: Frances Sheridan

Pseudonym: The Editor of Sidney Bidulph

Pseudonym: The Author of the Discovery

Pseudonym: The Late Editor of the Former Part

FS was a novelist and dramatist whose adult writing career was cut short after less than seven years. She was a leading practitioner of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel. She also wrote poetry.

Full profile

Connections

Connections	Author name Sort descending	Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships	Caroline Blackwood	Through her father, CB was descended from the writer Frances Sheridan , though the Sheridan blood was thought of in the family as bad blood, and CB 's biographer seems to associate it solely...
Textual Production	Charlotte Brooke	Some years before her death CB wrote her tragedy Belisarius on a story popularised by Marmontel in his Bélisaire, 1767 (which had first reached English in the same year as its French publication). Charles Kemble
Intertextuality and Influence	Frances Brooke	This was one of the earliest novels of sensibility, and was probably influenced by Frances Sheridan 's Sidney Bidulph. Its sentimental content, however, co-exists both with comment on politics and with a coherent plot...
Family and Intimate relationships	Rhoda Broughton	The Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu was RB 's uncle by marriage. Himself a grandson of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and great-grandson of Frances Sheridan , he had married Broughton's mother's sister (who was born Susanna Bennett
Textual Features	Maria Susanna Cooper	The protagonist, Mrs Villars, is introduced in letters from Lady Egerton, who was very ill at Bath when Mrs Villars saved her life, and is now staying at her benefactress's house in Essex. Lady...
Textual Production	Hannah Cowley	According to the memoir published here, HC wrote rapidly, revising nothing and often not saving short poems at all. Most of her smaller poems were written without rising from the chair in which the thought...
Textual Features	Maria Edgeworth	This essay includes elements of fiction and reportage. It both exemplifies and defends the colourful and linguistically distinct qualities of Irish lower-class speech, pointing out that for these speakers English is their second language. (This...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text	Anne Katharine Elwood	Some of the British women writers discussed in the text remain well-known, but others have slipped into obscurity. Memoirs includes: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Griselda Murray , Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford , Hester Lynch Piozzi
Friends, Associates	Sarah Fielding	SF 's important friendship with Samuel Richardson probably dates from about 1744. In 1750 he included her and Jane Collier in a list of thirty-six superior women, most of them his friends. Through Richardson she...
Occupation	David Garrick	This began his career as theatre manager. One of a manager's duties might be considered to be the putting on of new plays, to ensure the health of the theatre of the future, but familiar...
Textual Features	Phebe Gibbes	The heroine, who is initially called Ella, is represented as needing to read novels in order to learn about social skills, duties, and distinctions as depicted by a Brooks [sic], a Sheridan , a Burney
Occupation	William Godwin	The imprint M. J. Godwin and Company was launched the following year. The business flourished, becoming almost a literary salon like that of Joseph Johnson : visitors included Germaine de Staël . It remained, however...
Literary responses	Charlotte Lennox	This time Lennox had at least a moderate stage success, bringing her a welcome author's benefit night. The London Stage 1660-1800. Southern Illinois University Press. 4: 1928ff She became the first successful female novelist of her generation to break into theatre, as Frances Sheridan
Intertextuality and Influence	Charlotte Lennox	Euphemia tells her life-story to her friend Maria, whose reciprocal relation takes up part of volume one. The tone is more sentimental than that of Lennox's previous novels, although this is a more political work...
Intertextuality and Influence	Alethea Lewis	The Sheridan quoted on the title-page is probably Frances . AL enjoys playing with different styles. One of the two young heroes opens the book with a long, complicated aphorism about love and obedience to...

Timeline

1780

James Harrison (hitherto chiefly known as a music publisher) began to issue the handsomely-produced Novelists' Magazine, a weekly serial reprinting of canonical novels.

1814

John Colin Dunlop published The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age.

Texts

Sheridan, Frances. Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. J. Dodsley, 1767.

Sheridan, Frances. Eugenia and Adelaide. C. Dilly, 1791.

Sheridan, Frances. “Introduction”. The Plays of Frances Sheridan, edited by Richard Hogan and Jerry C. Beasley, University of Delaware Press, 1984, pp. 13-35.

Townsend, Sue, and Frances Sheridan. “Introduction”. Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, Pandora Press, 1987, p. ix - xi.

Sheridan, Frances. “Introduction”. Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, edited by Jean Coates Cleary et al., World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Sheridan, Frances. Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. R. and J. Dodsley, 1761.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, and Frances Sheridan. Sheridan’s Plays, now printed as he wrote them, and his mother’s unpublished comedy, A Journey to Bath. Editor Rae, W. Fraser, D. Nutt, 1902.

Sheridan, Frances. The Discovery. T. Davies, 1763.

Sheridan, Frances. The Dupe. A. Millar, 1764.

Sheridan, Frances. The History of Nourjahad. J. Dodsley, 1767.

Sheridan, Frances. The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. Editors Hutner, Heidi and Nicole Garret, Broadview Press, 2011.

Sheridan, Frances. The Plays of Frances Sheridan. Editors Hogan, Robert and Jerry C. Beasley, University of Delaware Press, 1984.