Frances Sheridan
Frances Sheridan was an accomplished Irish author and playwright, notable for her literary connections, particularly as the mother of the renowned playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Born Frances Chamberlaine, she faced significant challenges in her upbringing, including a restrictive education imposed by her clergyman father, who believed in the inferiority of women. Despite this, her brothers supported her education, enabling her to develop her literary skills. Frances's early work included a romance written in secrecy during her teens, which laid the foundation for her later achievements.
She published her first novel, *Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph*, in 1761, with guidance from the prominent novelist Samuel Richardson. This epistolary novel, dedicated to Richardson, was well-received and translated into multiple languages. Frances also wrote two successful comedies, performed at the Theatre Royal, and her later work, *The History of Nurjahad*, published posthumously, further solidified her reputation as a moral storyteller. Through her literary contributions and her connections within the artistic community, Frances Sheridan played a significant role in the landscape of 18th-century literature.
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Frances Sheridan
Writer
- Born: 1724
- Died: 1766
Biography
Frances Sheridan had solid literary connections. Her husband, Thomas, was an actor, stage manager, and poet; her son was the noted Irish playwright and theater manager, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). Born Frances Chamberlaine, she was raised in her native Ireland by her father, Philip, a somewhat forbidding clergyman, and his servants. Her mother died shortly after she was born.
Philip Chamberlaine was a staunch believer in the inferiority of women and did not support having Frances acquire skills of literacy considered necessary for males but useless for women. Frances, however, had accommodating brothers who not only taught her to read and write but who schooled her in Latin and botany as well.
When she was in her mid-teens, Frances wrote a romance, Eugenia and Adelaide (1791), but did so secretly to avoid her father’s disapproval. Born with a defect that made her lame, it was assumed that she would remain a spinster. She first met Thomas Sheridan after he read a poem she published in which she praised him. The two married in 1747. They lived in Dublin and at their country home at Quilea until 1754, when Thomas went to London to work at Covent Garden Theatre. She followed him there, but in 1756, they returned to Dublin where they spent two years before returning permanently to London in 1758. Richard, their third child, was born in Ireland.
The Sheridans became close friends with Samuel Richardson, whose first novel, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, had been published in 1740. Frances eventually mustered the courage to show Richardson her earlier romance. He advised her to attempt a work of more importance, which she promptly did. The result was her first novel, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, which Richardson helped her to have published in three volumes in 1761.
Frances kept this work, like Pamela, an epistolary novel, secret from her husband until it was complete. She dedicated the book, which was well received and was translated into both French and German, to Richardson. Her sequel, Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, as Prepared for the Press by the Late Editor of the Former Part, was published in two volumes the year after Frances died.
Meanwhile, Frances Sheridan wrote two plays, The Discovery: A Comedy and The Dupe: A Comedy (pr. 1763), both of which were performed at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, where David Garrick was the theater manager. Garrick himself took a role in The Discovery: A Comedy, which was an outstanding success in 1763.
When Sheridan published her first novel, which has an unhappy ending, Ben Jonson questioned whether the suffering her ending caused readers could be morally justified. Partly as a reaction to Jonson’s criticism, she produced her lengthy response in The History of Nurjahad, by the Editor of Sidney Biduph (1767), a highly moral story set in the Orient and published a year after she died. Readers received this book warmly.