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 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 Emily Frederick Clark
From EFC 's letters to the Royal Literary Fund it would seem that she entertained a very modest estimate of her own talents. Late in her career, for example, she calls her own works very...
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 Judith Kazantzis
A cover sheet lists the contents, with a sketch map of London in 1780 (the year the riots happened, in early June), a list of further reading, and some questions for essays or discussion. Six...
Textual Features Sarah Green
The tone of the work is conservative, leavened with an intelligent concern for development of independent thinking. Topics of various letters include Conduct and Conversation, Forbearance, Chastity, Truth, Employment of Time...
Textual Features Mary Ann Kelty
At the end of the first volume Mortimer twice proposes to Eliza: once face to face and unpremeditatedly, then by letter. She does not accept him. By the end of the next volume he is...
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 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.
7
She recommends reading poetry and history, not novels: Novel reading tends to enervate the mind. We rise from...
Textual Features Sarah Green
The plot owes something to Charlotte Lennox 's Female Quixote. The father of Green's heroine has lived through many crazes for novelists: first Burney , then Radcliffe , then Owenson , then Rosa Matilda
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.
1: 133, 152
She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
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, 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 Sarah Harriet Burney
Its plot concerns an idealised and under-appreciated orphan playing Cinderella among her richer cousins. It includes a sketch of an idealised Madame d'Arzele living in country retirement in England with a noble French refugee: a...
Textual Features Isabella Ormston Ford
In this pamphlet, which she directed towards the middle and upper classes, IOF declares herself interested in both the moral condition and the economic position of industrial women.
Ford, Isabella Ormston. Industrial Women and How to Help Them. Humanitarian League.
1
She argues that prostitution has economic...
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...

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