Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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...
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
Georgiana Fullerton
Henry Fothergill Chorley
, reviewing the novel for the Athenæum, found Grantley Manorhaunted by the intertextual spectre of Jane Austen
's Emma; he also drew parallels with Frances Burney
's Cecilia...
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...
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
Ann Radcliffe
Samuel Taylor Coleridge reviewed this novel somewhat belatedly for the Critical Review.
Wordsworth, Jonathan. The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age. Woodstock Books.
81
The review in the Analytical, probably Wollstonecraft
's, offered strong endorsement. AR
's uncommon talent for gothic, it said, had...
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...
AMB
's usual huge cast of characters ranging from satirical to sentimental is introduced by a preface signed by one of them, explaining that what follows will be the autobiographical tale of her chequered existence...
Intertextuality and Influence
Susanna Centlivre
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Austen
Anne Elliot, heroine of Persuasion, gets a second chance to marry the man she had rejected nine years before under pressure from her elders. His prospects of a self-made career did not at that...
