Relating a life : Alicia LeFanu's Memoirs of the life and writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan

Since its publication in 1824, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan has remained the only biography of one of the eighteenth century's most successful women writers. It has also endured as the most wellknown of the writings of its author, Alicia LeFanu, granddaughter of Frances and Thomas Sheridan, and the niece of Richard Brinsley. This article examines LeFanu's representation of Sheridan's exemplary character, her private experiences and professional achievements, and considers the extent to which LeFanu simultaneously reflects upon and negotiates the conditions of the reputable woman writer as defined by her own period. It argues that LeFanu's portrait of the ideal eighteenth-century wife, mother and author is complicated by her interest in Sheridan's resistance to the conventional limitations imposed upon her sex. It also aims to bring LeFanu's connection with the family more sharply into focus, recognising the irony of the memoirist's own unremarked end, and contributing to a re-evaluation of her literary significance