Frances Burney: The Life in the WorksTreating 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. 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 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, in this 1989 book Doody shows an appreciation of the many dimensions of a predecessor's writings and she tells her story with force and conviction. |
Contents
Introduction I | 1 |
Frances or A Young Ladys Entrance into Life | 9 |
Evelina or A Young Ladys Entrance into | 35 |
The Finished Comedy | 66 |
Cecilia or Memoirs of an Heiress | 99 |
The Windsor | 150 |
Marriage Clarinda and Camilla or A Picture | 199 |
Mysteries Clues and Guilty Characters | 239 |
Incest Bereavement and the Late Comic Plays | 274 |
Revolution | 313 |
End of Story | 369 |
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Common terms and phrases
Belfield BL Egerton Burney's Camilla Cecilia characters Charles Burney Charlotte Clarinda comedy comic Crisp critics d'Arblay Dabler daughter death Delany Delvile Diary Edgar Edwy eighteenth-century Elgiva Elinor emotional Esther Eugenia Evelina Fanny Burney father FB to SBP fear feel female feminine fiction Frances Burney Frances's French friendship George Cambridge girl give Harleigh Harrel Hemlow Henry Thrale heroine Hester Lynch Hester Lynch Piozzi Hester Thrale Ibid idea Joyce Juliet Lady Smatter language letter living London look Lord Macartney Madame Duval male manuscript Marchmont marriage marry Mary Mary Delany Memoirs mind Mirvan Miss moral Mortimer mother never novel novelist Piozzi play reader Rishton Samuel Crisp Sarah Harriet Burney satire scene Schwellenberg seems sense sexual sister social story Susanna thing thought tion tragedies Tyrold Wanderer wants wife Wilmot wish Witlings woman Woman-Hater women writing young