Novelist and playwright Frances (Fanny) Burney, 1752-1840, was also a prolific writer of journals and letters, beginning with the diary she started at fifteen and continuing until the end of her eventful life. From her youth in London high society to a period in the court of Queen Charlotte and her years interned in France with her husband Alexandre d'Arblay during the Napoleonic Wars, she captured the changing times around her, creating brilliantly comic and candid portraits of those she encountered - including the 'mad' King George, Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick and a charismatic Napoleon Bonaparte. She also describes, in her most moving piece, undergoing a mastectomy at fifty-nine without anaesthetic. Whether a carefree young girl or a mature woman, Fanny Burney's forthright, intimate and wickedly perceptive voice brings her world powerfully to life.
Frances Burney (1752–1840) was the most successful female novelist of the eighteenth century. Her first novel Evelina was a publishing sensation; her follow-up novels Cecilia and Camilla were regarded as among the best fiction of the time and were much admired by Jane Austen. Burney's life was equally remarkable: a protegee of Samuel Johnson, lady-in-waiting at the court of George III, later wife of an emigre aristocrat and stranded in France during the Napoleonic Wars, she lived on into the reign of Queen Victoria. Her journals and letters are now widely read as a rich source of information about the Court, social conditions and cultural changes over her long lifetime. This Companion is the first volume to cover all her works, including her novels, plays, journals and letters, in a comprehensive and accessible way. It also includes discussion of her critical reputation, and a guide to further reading.
First published in 1796, Camilla, Fanny Burney's third novel, proved to be an enormous popular success. It deals with the matrimonial concerns of a group of young people-Camilla Tyrold and her sisters, the daughters of a country parson, and their cousin Indiana Lynmere-and, in particular, with the love affair between Camilla herself and her eligible suitor, Edgar Mandlebert.
Frances Burney’s journals and letters, composed between 1768 and 1839, contain a unique account of the creative, social, and commercial ambitions and achievements of an eighteenth-century female writer. Focusing on Burney’s literary life, this selection from her journals and correspondence combines Burney’s own accounts of the creation of her popular novels, her aspirations for her dramatic writings, and her reflections upon her letters and journals as literary productions in their own right. In addition to Burney’s letters and journal entries, this Broadview edition includes: selections from Burney’s Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793) and Memoirs of Doctor Burney (1832); letters by family and friends about her literary activities; and contemporary reviews of The Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay.
‘Dazzling...full of special delights. Harman excels in the vivid presentation of scenes, the selection of detail...[a] marvellous and beautifully written book.’ Elspeth Barker, Independent on Sunday
Best known as a novelist and social satirist whose work anticipated Jane Austen's, Frances Burney (1752-1840) has also been recognized as an important writer in the history of feminist literature. Julia Epstein now offers a new interpretation of Burney and her work: that Burney's anger at the economic and social conditions of women emerges in her writing in moments of barely contained violence, and that her representations of violence and hostility provide a key to Burney's literary power. The Iron Pen situates Burney's writings within the sociopolitical context of the late eighteenth century and proposes a new approach to the development of the novel of manners. In addition, Epstein presents a comprehensive study of the reception of Burney's work from its original publication to the present. This study illuminates the history of popular book reviewing and of academic literary scholarship as political enterprises. Beginning with an examination of Burney's journals and letters, including an account of the mastectomy she underwent without anesthesia while in exile in Paris in 1811, Epstein then offers readings of Burney's four novels, paying close attention to the depiction of repressed anger and violence that characterizes all her work. The final section traces critics' responses to Burney's published writings from 1778, when her first novel, Evelina, appeared anonymously, to the present in readings informed by psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and feminist literary theory. Drawing upon the work of critics of eighteenth-century culture such as Mary Poovey, Ellen Pollak, Ruth Perry, and Margaret Doody, Epstein is successful in two ways: in combining an analysis of a set of texts with an analysis of a particular set of cultural assumptions and in her intentional underscoring of the complex nature of critical practice.
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Set in England during the period of the French Revolution, The Wanderer chronicles the ordeals of an ́emigr ́ee's escape from France and the Terror and her attempts to earn a living while guarding her own secrets. Tracing the heroine's progress through a cross-section of English working life, this novel covers various social issues--from racism, to feminism--in its critique of the English middle class.
In Backstage in the Novel, Francesca Saggini traces the unique interplay between fiction and theater in the eighteenth century through an examination of the work of the English novelist, diarist, and playwright Frances Burney. Moving beyond the basic identification of affinities between the genres, Saggini establishes a literary-cultural context for Burney's work, considering the relation between drama, a long-standing tradition, and the still-emergent form of the novel. Through close semiotic analysis, intertextual comparison, and cultural contextualization, Saggini highlights the extensive metatextual discourse in Burney's novels, allowing the theater within the novels to surface. Saggini’s comparative analysis addresses, among other elements, textual structures, plots, characters, narrative discourse, and reading practices. The author explores the theatrical and spectacular elements that made the eighteenth-century novel a hybrid genre infused with dramatic conventions. She analyzes such conventions in light of contemporary theories of reception and of the role of the reader that underpinned eighteenth-century cultural consumption. In doing so, Saggini contextualizes the typical reader-spectator of Burney’s day, one who kept abreast of the latest publications and was able to move effortlessly between "high" (sentimental, dramatic) and "low" (grotesque, comedic) cultural forms that intersected on the stage. Backstage in the Novel aims to restore to Burney's entire literary corpus the dimensionality that characterized it originally. It is a vivid, close-up view of a writer who operated in a society saturated by theater and spectacle and who rendered that dramatic text into narrative. More than a study of Burney or an overview of eighteenth-century literature and theater, this book gives immediacy to an understanding of the broad forces informing, and channeled through, Burney's life and work.
