Sheridan, Frances

Frances Sheridan was an eighteenth-century comedic playwright and novelist in the Sentimental and Oriental novel traditions. Her works include The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), its Conclusion (1767), and The History of Nourjahad (1767). The spouse of Thomas Sheridan (1719–1788) and the mother of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), Alicia Sheridan Lefanu (1753–1817), and Elizabeth Sheridan Lefanu (1758–1837), she was the matriarch of one of the most prolific literary families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Frances Sheridan is traditionally associated with the school of Samuel Richardson (1698–1761) because of her sentimental epistolary novels and close personal ties to the Richardson family; however, Sheridan’s earliest work was produced years before the publication of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), and her mature work makes significant generic and thematic departures from Richardson’s model. Sheridan’s enduring influence and posthumous publications make her a virtual contemporary of Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth and an important figure in the prehistory of the Romantic novel in English.