Description
Sidney's engagement to Orlando Faulkland becomes complicated when his previous affair with the pregnant Miss Burchell comes to light. Renouncing Faulkland, Sidney marries a second suitor. But neither the passionate and devoted Faulkland nor the ardently inflamed Miss Burchell disappears from her life. 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 good conduct.
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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 theconjugal 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 theliterary and social climate in which it was written.
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