Toxic Love: Gender and Genre in Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph

Abstract

How can so exemplary a heroine of sensibility as Sidney be so brutally punished in an apparently typical conduct fiction like Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761)? This essay locates one cause for the novel’s unsatisfying effect in the hostility depicted between the sexes, which undermines the novel’s conduct-fiction moral code. Through close reading informed by queer theory and social history, I argue that all the major characters experience relationships poisoned by conflicting loyalties and interests—in familial bonds, homosocial friendships between pairs of both men and women, and heterosexual affairs. The emotional dysfunctionality of these social relations reflects the eighteenth-century cultural confusion over such issues as the social value of sensibility, the nature of sentimental friendship and its relationship to same-sex relations and to heterosexual unions. The account of these toxic rivalries suggests that this novel offers a satirical critique of conduct fiction because the genre endorses an anti-feminist ideology predicated on gender division.