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.
From this plot Frances Burney
borrowed the four guardians of her heroine in Cecilia. Walter Scott
thought the plot was extravagant enough (when the play was a hundred and ten years old) yet that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Austen
Despite some later revision, Northanger Abbey is essentially (like its ancestor Susan) a novel of the 1790s, a spoof of both the gothic and romance modes which were then all the rage. Austen's specific...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Meeke
The setting is pre-revolutionary France. The novel opens with a maxim about the difficulty of unequal friendships. It proffers its story as an exception to this rule, relating the most tender affection
Meeke, Elizabeth. Count St. Blancard. Arno Press.
1: 3
Intertextuality and Influence
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
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
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.
2nd ser. 2 (1791): 233
Literary responses
Jane Austen
Some Austen news items are regrettable. In an interview with the Royal Geographical Society
in June 2011, V.S. Naipaul
, in asserting his own superiority to women writers (and claiming he could tell male from...
Literary responses
Catherine Gore
The year after these two novels appeared, a writer in The New Spirit of the Age measured CG
unflatteringly against the humour of Frances Burney
or the lifelike precision of Jane Austen
, but credited...
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, 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.
199
It...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Hervey
The Critical Reviewread this pleasing and interesting story as an imitation of Burney
's Cecilia.If there is a fault, it suggested, it was the structural fault of raising and solving one difficulty...
Literary responses
Frances Brooke
FB
was listed by the Monthly Review as one of the nine British Muses in April 1774. Anna Seward
in 1796 recorded her preference of the lively Brooke to Frances Burney
, of whom each...
Literary responses
Ellis Cornelia Knight
Dinarbas was popular during ECK
's lifetime. It warranted fairly favourable mention from Frances Burney
, who wrote to a friend that if you could overlook the presumption of the idea of writing a continuation...
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.
Neither the Critical nor the Monthly reviewer (the latter of whom was Andrew Becket
) seems to have looked back at notices of The Gamesters, since both assumed that the author of this novel...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Frances Burney
thought this the best of all Barbauld's poems. Hannah More
wrote to thank ALB
for writing so well on a subject so near her, More's heart,
Paul, Lissa. The Children’s Book Business. Routledge.
