Frances Burney

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Standard Name: Burney, Frances
Birth Name: Frances Burney
Nickname: Fanny
Nickname: The Old Lady
Married Name: Frances D'Arblay
Indexed Name: Madame D'Arblay
Pseudonym: A Sister of the Order
Used Form: the author of Evelina
Used Form: the author of Evelina and Cecilia
Used Form: the author of Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla
FB , renowned as a novelist in her youth and middle age, outlived her high reputation; her fourth and last novel (published in 1814) was her least well received. Her diaries and letters, posthumously published, were greeted with renewed acclaim. During the late twentieth century the re-awakening of interest in her fiction and the rediscovery of her plays revealed her as a woman of letters to be reckoned with. Today her reputation in the academic world stands high, and productions of her plays are no longer isolated events.
Photo of the painting of Frances Burney by her cousin Edward Francisco Burney, c. 1784-5. She is turned to the viewer's left with lowered gaze, wearing a long-sleeved pale pink gown with a pink bow and a dark shawl; but the portrait is dominated by her huge hat with puffed-up crown and bow of broad ribbon. National Portrait Gallery

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Reception Caroline Herschel
In the beginning CH 's reputation was usually judged more as that of a woman and a sister than as that of a scientist. Frances Burney 's admiration and delight was directed at her as...
Reception Beatrix Potter
She sometimes wrote of her own drawing and painting as an obsession: Why cannot one be content to look at it? I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result. But also, watching and...
Reception Elizabeth Hervey
It has been until recently a given of literary history that William Beckford had his half-sister in his sights in his two burlesques on women's novel-writing. The title-page of the first quotes Pope , thus...
Textual Features Charlotte Smith
CS regularly, however, interspersed in her novels specimens of the poetry on which she prided herself more. Her fiction mixes pathos and satire. She may depict mountains and castles, but draws on her own life...
Textual Features Susannah Dobson
SD says her previous choice of subjects (Petrarch and the troubadours) was dictated by the feeling that it was well worth while to pass over a multitude of tyrants, whose lives are written in blood...
Textual Features Mary Russell Mitford
MRM has no patience with Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The Countess and Gertrude or with Byron 's Childe Harold.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
1: 133, 152
She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
Textual Features Helena Wells
HW says she has more respect for the upper classes than some of our modern reformists.
Wells, Helena. Letters on Subjects of Importance to the Happiness of Young Females. L. Peacock; W. Creech, 1799.
7
She recommends reading poetry and history, not novels: Novel reading tends to enervate the mind. We rise from...
Textual Features Anna Maria Mackenzie
AMM 's opening address To the Readers of Modern Romance says that ancient romance was put paid to by the new source of amusement . . . struck out by Henry Fielding and Richardson (to...
Textual Features Mary Julia Young
MJY foregrounds her own friendship with Anna Maria Crouch, and finds room for such details as the opinions of Crouch's father, Peregrine Phillips , about novelists: he admired Charlotte Smith , Anna Maria Bennett ,...
Textual Features Catherine Hutton
This character, which novelistic convention would make a peripheral caricature (though his vigorous writing style has no oddity like, for instance, that of Frances Burney 's Mr Briggs), becomes incorporated, without reforming in character, into...
Textual Features Elizabeth Thomas
The range of authors quoted for chapter-headings is similar to that in her last novel, with the notable addition of passages in both prose and poetry by Martha Homely, her own formerly-used pseudonym. Poems...
Textual Features Frances Jacson
The title-page quotes from Milton 's Samson Agonistes. An address To the Dethroned Sovereign Truth hopes for the restoration of this power which, says the author, is still present although obsolete and obscure. Her...
Textual Features Helen Craik
Authors quoted on HC 's title-page include La Rochefoucauld . Mary Robinson 's Walsingham is quoted in volume two and supplies the epigraph for volume three.
Craciun, Adriana, and Kari E. Lokke, editors. “The New Cordays: Helen Craik and British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793-1800”. Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, State University of New York Press, 2001, pp. 193-32.
228n47
The story opens shortly before the French Revolution...
Textual Features Anna Letitia Barbauld
The series has a general introduction, On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing, and a Preface, Biographical and Critical for each novelist, which in its echo of the full and original title of Johnson's...
Textual Features Ann Thicknesse
An introduction explains that this book, although called a novel, will not deal in pathetic tales of love, marvellous prodigies, or even . . . elegant flights of fancy, but only plain simple facts...

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