Frances Sheridan Reads John Home: Placing Sidney Bidulph in the Republic of Letters

Abstract

Frances Sheridan Reads John Home: Placing Sidney Bidulph in the Republic of Letters Betty A. Schellenberg In his article on "Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century," Lawrence E. Klein questions the "domestic thesis" put forwardby many feministhistories ofthe eighteenth century, athesis which employs the two binary oppositions of male/female and public/private to account for "the persistent exclusion of women from public roles, power, and citizenship." Klein notes that this model fails to take into account evidence that "even when theory was against them, women of the eighteenth century had [conscious] public dimensions to their lives." He goes on to suggest that such public dimensions are made conceptually possible by the multiple sets of distinctions from which individual identities are constructed, and that "a more precise account ofgender in relation to publicity and privacy can be achievedby closer examination ofboth space and language."1 Klein's critique seems to me particularly appropriate for studies of women novelists participating in the literary marketplace of the mideighteenth century, which have tended to begin with the assumption that, as 1 Lawrence E. Klein, "Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure," Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1995), 97, 102. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 13, Number 4, July 2001 562 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Kathryn Shevelow has put it, these writers were permitted to enter the public sphere of letters only to reinforce the figure of "the domestic woman, constructed in a relation of difference to men, a difference of kind rather than degree."2 In the example I will focus on here, the brief publishing career of Frances Sheridan has appeared an easy fit within a "private" and "feminized" tradition of the domestic and sentimental. After all, Sheridan is now known primarily for her novel The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), dedicated to Samuel Richardson as "the author of Clarissa and sir charles grandison," in tribute to "exemplary Goodness and distinguished Genius ... found united in One Person." Furthermore, Richardson actively encouraged Sheridan as a writer, and appears to have played some role in bringing this novel into print.3 Thus Janet Todd writes of Sheridan as one of the mid-century's "modest muses," fashioning her literary ambitions according to the constraints of a gendered ideology of public and private spheres, creating "not simply writing butfeminine writing." Margaret Anne Doody describes Sheridan as "a not unworthy follower of Richardson," whose probing of Richardson's fictions produces what "are feminine insights, or at least in the eighteenth century could have been expressed only by a female writer ... only by a sensibility with a deep knowledge of the meaning of powerlessness, and of lack of control over fate." Even Jean Coates Cleary's excellent introduction to Sidney Bidulph places the book in the tradition of the "conduct novel—inspired by Richardson, dedicated to him ... published as he was dying," and bearing "the Richardsonian legacy into the second half ofthe eighteenth century."4 If, however, following Klein, one pays closer attention to space— by which I mean the professional communities within which Sheridan moved—and language—the gestures of professional, political, and moral alignment or dissociation that she makes in her novel and in her correspondence—a picture emerges of a woman whose self-identification as a writer included not only domestic and moral, but also public and political ambitions. By particularizing a number of Sheridan's professional 2 Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 5. 3 For a recent account ofRichardson's encouragement of Sheridan's early fiction-writing efforts, see Jean Coates Cleary's introduction to Memoirs ofMiss Sidney Bidulph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. ix-xi. References are to this edition. 4 Janet Todd, The Sign ofAngelika: Women, Writing, and Fiction 1660-1800 (New York: Columbia, 1989), p. 125; Margaret Anne Doody, "Frances Sheridan: Morality and Annihilated Time," Fetter'd or Free: British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 327, 343, 356; Cleary, pp. xvi-xvii. FRANCES SHERIDAN'S SIDNEY BIDULPH 563 associations, as well as...

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