‘Frances Sheridan, Novels, and Memoirs’ opens by noting the generic and intertextual porousness of eighteenth-century writing, with the novel continually bleeding into forms that would subsequently come to be seen as distinct, such as travel writing, biography, and the memoir. Conversely, memoirs written in the period presented as non-fiction frequently show affinities to conventions of the novel. Frances Sheridan’s work provides a particularly rich site for exploring this cross-fertilisation, in that Sheridan was both the author of the bestselling novel Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) and in turn the subject of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan (1824), written by her granddaughter, Alicia Le Fanu. When these two texts are put in conjunction with one another, it becomes apparent that we should understand the eighteenth-century novel and the memoir as being in dialogue with one another, not as distinct or opposed forms of writing.

‘Lives and Adventures 1: Irish Women and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’ traces a line of development in fiction by Irish women, from the works of Mary Davys early in the century, which are concerned with identifying female agency in plot-structure through a variety of narrative strategies, to epistolary works of sensibility by mid century Irish women writers such as Frances Sheridan (1724–66) and Elizabeth Griffith (1727–93) where plot and form exist in tension, with the epistolatory form allowing women’s voices to speak through plots that would inhibit their agency. Through letter writing and the keeping of journals, and incorporating these elements into the novel, a new form of interiority emerges in eighteenth-century novels by Irish women. By the end of the century, the novels of Elizabeth Sheridan portray female lives of confidence and assertion by framing women’s lives in the context of an emerging nationalism.

In this reading of Frances Sheridan’s sentimental novel, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), centering a short embedded tale, previously dismissed as “padding,” flips the script such that didacticism serves as an object of critique instead of its vehicle. As a captivity narrative about debt and consent, “The History of Miss Price” tells of how its plucky tale heroine escapes a sexually predatory creditor, eventually achieving her comic ending with the help of Sidney Bidulph, the otherwise passive novel heroine. In a plot line more famously recirculated by Susanna Rowson in Charlotte Temple (1794) and Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), Sheridan provides a public forum for legitimating gendered harms previously silenced as too private to be shareable. As a successful speech act, the tale rebukes the novel heroine’s supposedly exemplary model of female passivity and quiescence, and its form, message, and critique are reiterated in the sequel, Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1767).