Evelina

by Burney, Frances; Jones, Vivien; Bloom, Edward A.

• ISBN13: 9780192840318
• ISBN10: 0192840312
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-07-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens, theatre visits, and balls. But Evelina's innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions--as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville. Evelina, comic and shrewd, is at once a guide to fashionable London, a satirical attack on the new consumerism, an investigation of women's position in the late eighteenth century, and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. ix
Note on the Text	p. xxxv
Select Bibliography	p. xxxvii
A Chronology of Frances Burney	p. xl
Evelina	p. 1
Explanatory Notes	p. 407
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