History furnishes a long list of women of talent whose sons were men of genius. Mrs. Sheridan's second son, Richard Brinsley, the author of the light and sparkling Rivals, inherited his mother's talents without her gloom. But Mrs. Sheridan also had some ability as a writer of comedy, and the most famous character of the Rivals was first sketched by her. In a comedy, A Journey to Bath, declined by Garrick, one of the characters was Mrs. Twyford, whom Richard Brinsley Sheridan transformed into that famous blundering coiner of words, Mrs. Malaprop.
Mrs. Sheridan's place in literature rests upon Sidney Biddulph. This novel was an innovation in English fiction. Nearly one hundred years earlier, Madame de Lafayette had written The Princess of Clèves, one of the most nearly perfect novels that has ever been written, and the first that depended for its interest, not alone on what was done, but on the subtle workings of the human heart which led to the doing of it. From that time the novels of French women were largely introspective. English women, however, were either less interested in the inner life, or more reserved in laying bare its secrets. Sidney Biddulph was the first English novel of this kind, and it left no definite trace on fiction, although it was the favourite novel of Charlotte Smith and had some slight effect upon her writings, and Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Opie, and Mary Brunton noted the feelings of their characters. Not until Jane Eyre was published, long after Mrs. Sheridan had been forgotten, was there any great English novel of the inner life.
In its day Sidney Biddulph was exceedingly popular on the continent of Europe as well as in England. It was translated into German, and an adaptation of it was made in French by the Abbé Prévost, under the title, Memoirs pour servir a l'histoire de la vertu. But after all, Sidney's sorrows were not real, or she herself was not real; and we of to-day smile or yawn over the pages that drew tears from the eyes of the mighty Dr. Johnson.
Notwithstanding the many excellencies of English fiction during the middle of the eighteenth century, it was held in low repute. There had been many writers attempting to portray real life who, without the genius of the greater novelists, could imitate only their faults. In the preface to Polly Honeycomb, which was acted at Drury Lane theatre in 1760, George Colman, the author, gives the titles of about two hundred novels whose names appeared in a circulating library at that time. Amorous Friars, or the Intrigues of a Convent; Beauty put to its Shifts, or the Young Virgin's Rambles; Bubbled Knights, or Successful Contrivances, plainly evincing, in two Familiar Instances lately transacted in this Metropolis, the Folly and Unreasonableness of Parents Laying a Restraint upon their Children's Inclinations in the Affairs of Love and Marriage; The Impetuous Lover, or the Guiltless Parricide; these are the titles of a few of the popular books of that period. Colman in the character of Polly Honeycomb, an earlier Lydia Languish, attempts to show the moral effects of such reading. Her head had been so turned by these books that her father exclaims, "A man might as well turn his daughter loose in Covent-Garden, as trust the cultivation of her mind to A CIRCULATING LIBRARY."
Fiction at this time lacked delicacy and refinement. The characters lived largely in the streets or taverns, and were too much engrossed in the pleasures of active life to give any heed to thoughts or emotions. Though love was the constant theme of these books, as yet no true love story had been written. The fires of home had not been lighted. The refinements, the pure affections, the high ideals which cluster around the domestic hearth had as yet no place in the novel. It needed the feminine element, which, while no broader than that which had previously made the novel, by its own addition gave something new to it and made it truer to life.
While no woman of marked genius had appeared, the number and influence of women novelists continued to increase throughout the eighteenth century. Tim Cropdale in the novel Humphry Clinker, who "had made shift to live many years by writing novels, at the rate of five pounds a volume," complains that "that branch of business is now engrossed by female authors, who publish merely for the propagation of virtue, with so much ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart, and all in the serene tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only enchanted by their genius, but reformed by their morality." Schlosser in his History of the Eighteenth Century pays this tribute to the moral influence of the women novelists: "With the increase of the number of writers in England in the course of the eighteenth century, women began to appear as authors instead of educating their children, and their influence upon morals and modes of thinking increased, as that of the clergy diminished."