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.
"Frances Burney" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Frances_d%27Arblay_%28%27Fanny_Burney%27%29_by_Edward_Francisco_Burney.jpg/840px-Frances_d%27Arblay_%28%27Fanny_Burney%27%29_by_Edward_Francisco_Burney.jpg.
Also on the boat, Adolphus meets a fourteen-year-old apparent orphan, Mary St Leger, and her saintly missionary uncle. Mary's guardian is not her uncle but the repellant Mr Abrams, who once in England encourages an...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Hutton
Jane Oakwood says (presumably standing in for her author, as she often does) that in youth she was accused of imitating Juliet, Lady Catesby (Frances Brooke
's translation from Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni
).
In a preface CC
says she found the incident that forms the centre of this novel in The Christian Life by Dr John Scott
(that is The Christian Life, from its beginning to its consummation...
Intertextuality and Influence
Helen Craik
The novel had been advertised in April as to be published speedily.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
1: 669
It appeared before the end of the year through the Minerva Press
in three volumes, with a frontispiece and French...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Fielding
Other women novelists found this a fertile text. Critic Susan Catto
suggested that the social ignorance of Lennox
's Arabella owes something to that of Ophelia. She also noted that at a ball the heroine...
Leisure and Society
Joanna Baillie
In the earlier 1840s, however, she was still a keen reader. She tackled the first edition of Frances Burney
's Diary and Letters out of a desire to get some insight into the literary society...
Literary responses
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Hester Lynch Piozzi
evidently felt later that these stories were very strong meat for children. She commented in a letter, I think a great Change has been made in Taste of popular Literature—or rather popular...
Literary responses
Cassandra Lady Hawke
CLH
's immediate family were warm in their admiration. Frances Burney
, who read Julia de Gramont when it was passed to her by the queen, found it all of a piece—all love, love, love...
Literary responses
Sarah Harriet Burney
Clarentine was a successful debut. The Critical Review (which opened its brief review on the author's relationship to her elder sister
) said it was greatly superior to novels of the ordinary stamp; and it...
Literary responses
Anna Maria Bennett
William Enfield
in the Monthly Review thought this book an inferior imitation of Burney
's Cecilia, but added a little faint praise. The Critical, with depressing predictability, censured AMB
's intricate plot and...
Samuel Johnson
pronounced in conversation that CL
was worthy to rank with the exceptional women Carter
, More
, and Burney
: more yet, she was superiour to them all.
Boswell, James, 1740 - 1795. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Editors Hill, George Birkbeck and Laurence Fitzroy Powell, Clarendon, 1934, 6 vols.
4: 275
Literary responses
Lady Charlotte Bury
Edward Copeland
argues that this text, though designed to ride the wave of the new silver-fork novel, draws its influences from an earlier generation: Frances Burney
, Susan Ferrier
, and Richardson
's Sir Charles...
Literary responses
Charlotte Lennox
The novel was noticed in the Critical Review, which approved it, while diagnosing too much reliance on ideas from Frances Burney
.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
2nd ser. 2 (1791): 233
Literary responses
Charlotte Lennox
CL
kept copies of a number of verse tributes to her talents. She was one among the painter Richard Samuel
's The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain in 1778 (exhibited 1779).
Isles, Duncan. “The Lennox Collection (Concluded)”. Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol.
19
, No. 4, Oct. 1971, pp. 416-35.
429-31
Catto, Susan J. Modest Ambition: The Influence of Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and the Ideal of Female Diffidence on Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Frances Brooke. University of Oxford, 1998.
