Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Frances Burney
-
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.
LLS
's letters to Scott
show her to have been a trusted and perceptive critic of his novels, which she often read before publication. On The Heart of Mid-Lothian she sent him a major critique...
Family and Intimate relationships
Lady Louisa Stuart
It gave LLS
some trouble as a child that her grandmother was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
: I am sure I heartily hated her name. Whatever I wanted to learn, everybody was up in arms...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Strutt
Influence of Frances Burney
's Evelina is perceptible here, and influence of Jane Austen
seems at least a possibility: a family estate is named Maple Grove, as in Emma, and the heroine's marriage to...
Family and Intimate relationships
Jan Struther
In autumn 1939, within a month of publishing the book that was to make her famous, JS
first met Adolf Placzek
, or Dolf, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, thirteen years her junior (son...
Friends, Associates
Germaine de Staël
One of her associates in her English visit was the future husband
of Frances Burney
. Burney thought her a woman of the first abilities, very much in the style of Mrs Thrale but with...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
She does get away in the end and acquires several supporters (Lady Barbara Arden, Lord Dorringcourt, and his sister Lady Elinor), while Lord Valville is left to plot revenge with feelings even more diabolic than...
Textual Production
Charlotte Smith
It was small but handsome. Thomas Stothard
did two of the illustrations. His design for sonnet 12 (Written on the Sea Shore.—October 1784—the month in which she crossed the Channel with her children...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Smith
Three women help each other escape male persecution; the distressed heroine gets an ideal husband, Godolphin, who restores the social status which her illegitimate birth had robbed her of. Though the castle where Emmeline grows...
Literary responses
Charlotte Smith
The Critical Review, reviewing this book, called CS
a sister-queen
Fletcher, Loraine. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Macmillan.
141
of the novel with Frances Burney
. William Enfield
in the Monthly praised it warmly.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
On the strength of this novel the Critical Review hailed CS
as less agitating than Ann Radcliffe
, less diverting than Frances Burney
, but more true to nature than either. In the Monthly...
politics
May Sinclair
It was an act of great courage for MS
to make herself so conspicuous. Cicely Hamilton
and Catherine Gasquoine Hartley
led the procession. Members of the WWSL each carried a goose quill and a bannerette...
Education
Mary Martha Sherwood
From a very early age, MMS
remembered my mother teaching me to read with my brother, in a book where [there] was a picture of a white horse feeding by star-light.
Sherwood, Mary Martha, and Henry Sherwood. The Life of Mrs. Sherwood. Editor Kelly, Sophia, Darton.
23
From the age...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anna Seward
AS
's correspondence often deals with literary matters as well as with social matters and personalities. She writes with astonishing freedom to Hester Piozzi
about the latter's travel book Observations and Reflections: not only...
Textual Production
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
While apparently received enthusiastically
Foster, Edward Halsey. Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Twayne.
129
in America, this book had a more mixed reception in Britain. A long review in the Athenæum began by describing CMS
as clear of affectation to the extent of being...
Timeline
May 1992: The Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British...
Parker, Pamela Corpron. “A Conference of Our Own: on the 20th Anniversary of the BWWA”. The Female Spectator, Vol.
16
, No. 1, p. 6.
6
November 2003: A painting by John Hoppner entitled Portrait...
Women writers item
November 2003
A painting by John Hoppner
entitled Portrait of a Lady as Evelina (Frances Burney
's earliest heroine, born in January 1778) sold at Sotheby
's to an unnamed private buyer for £173,600.
6 May 2009: The antiquarian book collection of the late...
Women writers item
6 May 2009
The antiquarian book collection of the late Paula Fentress Peyraud
(the largest in private hands), auctioned in New York, fetched more than $1.5 million US. Books by women between 1760 and 1830 predominated.
