Frances Burney : the life in the works / Margaret Anne Doody.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Doody, Margaret Anne.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Burney, Fanny, 1752-1840.

Burney, Fanny.

Novelists, English--18th century--Biography.

Novelists, English.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xv, 441 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, genealogical table ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, [1988]

Summary:

Treating Frances Burney (1752-1840) with the seriousness usually reserved for later novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Margaret Anne Doody combines biographical narrative with informed literary criticism as she analyzes not only Burney's published novels, but her plays, fragments of novels, poems, and other works never published. Doody also draws upon a mine of letters and diaries for detailed and sometimes surprising biographical information.

The opening chapter examines the effect on Frances Burney of the loss of her mother when the child was ten years old and of her subsequent intense relationship with her father. Her plays and novels are, among many other things, messages to her father. Burney's family life was a scene of strain, rebellion, secret codes, rejections, and hidden feelings--all of which were to emerge in a case of fraternal incest that afflicted the family. Burney's own happy (but late) marriage to a penniless French emigre was a double triumph over familial inhibitions and community disapproval.

Burney's feelings and emotions forcefully emerge in her sophisticated and complex late novels, Camilla and The Wanderer. Her novels all relate to personal experience; as an artist she is attracted to the violent, the painful, the grotesque, and the macabre. She is a powerful comic writer, but her comedy is far from reflecting a shallow cheerfulness. Bringing a novelist's perspective to her material, Doody shows an appreciation of the many dimensions of a predecessor's writings and she tells her story with force and conviction.

Contents:

A Burney Family Tree xvi

1 Frances; or, A Young Lady's Entrance into Life 9

2 Evelina; or, A Young Lady's Entrance into the World 35

3 The Witlings: The Finished Comedy 66

4 Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress 99

5 Love, Loss, and Imprisonment: The Windsor and Kew Tragedies 150

6 Marriage, "Clarinda," and Camilla; or, A Picture of Youth 199

7 Camilla: Mysteries, Clues, and Guilty Characters 239

8 Incest, Bereavement, and the Late Comic Plays 274

9 The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties: Revolution, the Rights of Woman, and "The Wild Edifice" 313

10 End of Story 369.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

081351309X :

0813513553

OCLC:

17413614