Toxic Love: Gender and Genre in Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph.

This article analyzes Frances Sheridan’s 1761 novel *Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph*, focusing on its depiction of toxic gendered relationships and its critique of eighteenth-century conduct fiction. The novel portrays hostile and dysfunctional emotional ties across familial, homosocial, and heterosexual relationships, revealing conflicts between competing loyalties that undermine the moral codes of sensibility and conduct literature. Through close reading informed by queer theory and social history, the article argues that Sheridan exposes the limitations and anti-feminist ideology embedded in conduct fiction’s gender divisions, illustrating how sentimental female delicacy and male homosocial bonds contribute to oppression, self-denial, and tragic outcomes. The novel’s extreme characters and tragic plot suggest a satirical interrogation of sentimentalism and gender norms, highlighting the incompatibility of prescribed social codes with authentic desire and justice.