Author Description

Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph is at the center of many important currents in the eighteenth-century novel. It is a sentimental classic, a love story of great moral complexity, and also a probing example of conduct-book fiction. Sidney's story takes the cult of female distress into the conjugal relationship, showing the tortures that the virtuous mid-eighteenth-century woman suffers when she tries to live her life according to the period's laws of proper conduct. This is the only fully annotated edition of the book available, and it offers an introduction that examines the literary and social climate in which it was written.