Definition of "Frances"

Armado. Sirrah Costard, I will enfranchise thee.Costard. O! marry me to one Frances: I smell some l'envoy, some goose, in this.

c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Loues Labour’s Lost”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act III, scene i]

"My name is Frances. Don't call me Fanny!" "Why not?" "Because it's too absurd to be endured! What does the mere sound of Fanny suggest? A flirting dancing creature - plump and fair, and playful and pretty! - - - Call me Frances - a man's name, with only the difference between an i and an e. No sentiment in it, hard, like me."

1883, Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science, Chatto and Windus, page 227

My other sisters had interesting names. There was Francie, that was Frances, and though she wore slacks and my father seemed angry with her, I thought she was some relation to Saint Francis, who, I believed, kept animals in his pocket and took them out and licked them, the way Francie licked a blackball or acid drop, for pure love.

1961, Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry, page 97

The malaise of French politics has commonly been interpreted as a product of a deep-seated conflict between the ‘two Frances’.

1967, Eric A. Nordlinger, The Working-class Tories, page 236

Although scholars have offered different chronologies and causalities for the move toward modernity, most have resolved the paradox of the two Frances by placing them in sequence: "diverse France gave way over time as modern centralized France gathered force."

1998, Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore, page 2

Was it the end of the long conflict between the two Frances? Yes and no.

2013, Making Sense of the Secular: Critical Perspectives, page 48