Playwright and novelist Frances Sheridan was wife to actor and theater manager Thomas Sheridan and mother of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, one of the eighteenth century's most important playwrights, who was influenced by his mother's work. Frances Sheridan published the novel Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph in two parts in 1761 and 1767. Her play The Discovery (1763) is worthy of at least as much attention as any of her fiction.