Born: 1758, United Kingdom
Died: 4 January 1837
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Anne Elizabeth Lefanu
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Ian Campbell Ross. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Sheridan, Anne Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) (married name: Lefanu) (1758–1837), novelist and diarist, was the fourth and youngest surviving child of Thomas Sheridan, stage manager and elocutionist, and the novelist and playwright Frances Sheridan (née Chamberlaine). Her siblings were Charles Francis, writer and politician, Richard Brinsley, playwright and politician, and Alicia, later Lefanu. Elizabeth was born in London, where her parents moved in literary circles that included Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson. At the age of five or six, Sheridan, together with Charles and Alicia, accompanied her parents to Blois, as Thomas Sheridan’s financial problems forced him to evade his creditors by a move to France. In 1766 Frances Sheridan died and Thomas left exile in Blois, his children later joining him in Dublin. Elizabeth Sheridan was around twelve when her father’s activity as an elocutionist took the family to Bath, where Richard Brinsley would meet the celebrated young singer Elizabeth Linley, with whom he eloped to France in 1772. The tense situation that resulted led Thomas to take both his daughters to Dublin where, for several years following, Elizabeth assisted her father by helping to transcribe his educational writings.
In 1780, Sheridan published Emeline: a moral tale, ascribed on the title page of its Dublin edition simply to ‘A Lady’. No copy of that first edition is known to survive but it was reprinted in London three years later as The fairy ring: or, Emeline, a moral tale (1783). Stephen Colbert, Sheridan’s Irish publisher, advertised her feminist fairy tale as offering ‘Many circumstances … that interest, at this juncture, the IRISH Nation’ and indeed the fiction anticipates the Irish political themes that she would shortly write about more openly (Dublin Evening Post, 18 Mar. 1780).
The triumph of prudence over passion; or, the history of Miss Mortimer and Miss Fitzgerald (1781) first appeared in Dublin, being subsequently reprinted in London as The reconciliation; or, history of Miss Mortimer, and Miss Fitzgerald: an Hibernian novel (1783). The vivid opening of the epistolary fiction offers an account by Louisa Mortimer, ‘an enthusiast in the cause of Liberty and my country’, of the ‘most glorious sight’ of the armed Volunteers on College Green, Dublin, on 4 November 1779, when their canon were decorated with the slogan ‘Free trade or else’ (Sheridan, The triumph, 31, 32). Louisa asserts the need for greater legislative freedom for the Irish parliament and, in a marked departure from contemporary fictional convention, asserts her own independence by declining to marry her admirer at the novel’s end. Her creator, by contrast, lived a life of dependence for some years. She kept house, unhappily, for her brother Charles, an MP (1776–90) and later an under-secretary in the administration in Dublin Castle (1782–90), and later assisted her father in London, Bath and Tunbridge Wells. During these years, she wrote lively, lengthy letters to her now-married sister, Alicia Lefanu, in Dublin. A selection of these were published by a descendant of the family, William LeFanu, as Betsy Sheridan’s journal (1960), though the diminutive form of her name was not Elizabeth’s own preference. After Thomas Sheridan died in 1788, Elizabeth lived for a while with her brother Richard Brinsley and his family, continuing to write to Alicia on domestic matters and political life.
Elizabeth Sheridan’s frustration at her dependence as an unmarried woman of limited means is a recurrent subject of her letters – ‘Still the same old life’, she wrote dejectedly in 1785 (LeFanu, 45) – and in 1789 she married the army officer Henry Lefanu, brother of Alicia’s husband Joseph, becoming mother to three children, including the future novelist Alicia LeFanu (1791–1867). Recurring financial problems, alleviated in part by assistance from Richard Brinsley, eventually led Elizabeth to open what was advertised as an ‘English and French grammar day-school, for young ladies’ at Bath in 1798 (Fitzer, 67). The experience appears to have influenced Sheridan’s decision to return to fiction in 1803, for Lucy Osmond: a story is avowedly more didactic than her earlier work. The epistolary fiction, bearing a title-page motto from The discovery, a 1763 comedy by her mother, appeared anonymously in London; it was followed by a New York edition and a French translation, published in Paris, in the following year. In her introduction, Sheridan declares that ‘The following Story is offered to the Public, chiefly with a view of conveying sentiments and opinions, that may not, I hope, be wholly useless to young persons of my own sex’. These heavily qualified aspirations are echoed in Sheridan’s comment on authorial anonymity: ‘Though conscious of the disadvantage of sending a work into the world without a name, and having some claim to one, which is “not unsettled in the rolls of fame” I am so certain of being unable to add to its celebrity, and so fearful of disgracing it, that I rather chuse to remain in the shade …’. (Lucy Osmond has been attributed to Elizabeth’s sister Alicia but their cousin William Chamberlain(e), writing in 1804, referred to Elizabeth, whom he knew well, as the ‘elegant authoress of Lucy Osmond and The India voyage’.) When Sheridan acknowledged authorship of The India voyage (1804), she did so as ‘Mrs H. Lefanu, daughter of the Late Thomas Sheridan, M.A.’. Conscious that epistolary fiction was no longer fashionable in the early nineteenth century, Sheridan cast her final novel, The sister: a tale (1810), as a third-person narrative, though the continuing preoccupation of the effect of domestic ills on the female members of a family echo both her earlier work and elements of her own experience.
In later years Sheridan added importantly to the celebrity of the family name by writing a memoir concerning her brother’s elopement, used by Thomas Moore in his Memoirs of the life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1825) and William Fraser Rae in his Sheridan (1896). Elizabeth Sheridan died on 4 January 1837 in Leamington Spa, England. Given that the unhappy relegation of women to the domestic margins of life was a constant theme of Sheridan’s fiction and personal letter writing, it is ironic that it has taken so long for her life and work to be accorded the recognition they merit in Ireland’s national biographical dictionary.