Frances Burney: The Life in the Works

by Margaret Anne Doody

• ISBN13: 9780521158923
• ISBN10: 0521158923
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-01-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

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. 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, Doody shows an appreciation of the many dimensions of a predecessor's writings and she tells her story with force and conviction.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Abbreviations and Short Titles	p. xiv
A Burney Family Tree	p. xvi
Introduction	p. 1
Frances; or, A Young Lady's Entrance into Life	p. 9
Evelina; or, A Young Lady's Entrance into the World	p. 35
The Witlings: The Finished Comedy	p. 66
Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress	p. 99
Love, Loss, and Imprisonment: The Windsor and Kew Tragedies	p. 150
Marriage, "Clarinda," and Camilla; or, A Picture of Youth	p. 199
Camilla: Mysteries, Clues, and Guilty Characters	p. 239
Incest, Bereavement, and the Late Comic Plays	p. 274
The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties: Revolution, the Rights of Woman, and "The Wild Edifice"	p. 313
End of Story	p. 369
Conclusion	p. 385
Notes	p. 391
Index	p. 427
Index of Works	p. 438
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