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.
A few statements are footnoted to their originators, whom EPW
has either paraphrased or versified: Sherlock and Lavater
are her favourites, but she also draws on lighter writers like Horace
, Swift
, and Coleridge
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
).
Hutton, Catherine. Oakwood Hall. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
3: 95
Intertextuality and Influence
Mrs E. M. Foster
Judith, the remaining MEMF
novel of 1800, is attributed to the author of Rebecca, Miriam, and Fitzmorris &c. There was German translation in 1802.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
2: 115
The incredibly complex plot follows...
Intertextuality and Influence
Beatrix Potter
BP
was not content with her success as a children's writer, but hankered to establish herself as an author for adults. Her references in her private writings to Burney
(a propos of her first appearance...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Julia Frankau
This tie broadens the social scope of the novel. Karl is Jewish but not an observant Jew. He wishes he could believe in Christianity for its redeeming message and wants to extend that choice to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Cuthbertson
The troubles of the pattern, orphan heroine, Julia De Clifford, are fairly conventional. Her father was the younger son of a noble family, disinherited in spite of being a military hero; when she enters fashionable...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Maria Bennett
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...
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
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
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
Friends, Associates
Henrietta Maria Bowdler
Frances Burney
preferred HMB
, as more kind and gentle, to her sister Frances Bowdler. Burney amusingly records a visit by herself, HMB and others, to Lady Miller
of Batheaston on 8 June 1780, when...
Friends, Associates
Caroline Herschel
Though CH
recorded in summer 1774 that she had lost her only female acquaintance (apparently because her work for her brother left her no time for social life), she later met Charles
and Frances Burney