Mrs Sheridan's active demon: Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph and the Sly Rake in Petticoats

Fitzer, Anna M.

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Frances Sheridan, matriarch to one of Ireland's most significant literary families, singularly asserted her contribution to writing after Richardson in her successful and enduringly popular novel, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761). Principally concerned with its interest in a generically constructed ideal female virtue, the article focuses in particular on the disruptive agency of female libertinism, arguing that, in her encounter with the heroine as paragon, Sheridan's female rake challenges rather than confirms the neat oppositional terms of female representation. In its wry, innovative interrogation of desire and decorum Sheridan's novel facilitates a reading of heroine and rake as together suggestive of a heterogeneous femininity. Exploring the correspondence between the rake's duplicity and the heroine's own masquerade of virtue, the article acknowledges Sheridan's sophisticated engagement with, and response to, contemporary debates about female sensibility.

Citation

Fitzer, A. M. (2003). Mrs Sheridan's active demon: Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph and the Sly Rake in Petticoats. Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 18(1), 39-62. https://doi.org/10.3828/eci.2003.6

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2003
• Deposit Date: Apr 28, 2022
• Journal: Eighteenth-Century Ireland
• Print ISSN: 0790-7915
• Electronic ISSN: 2753-9725
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 39-62
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/eci.2003.6
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3590033