 |
This
essay examines the construction of Burney's reputation, and the appropriation
of her texts by women novelists, from the publication of her first novel
Evelina in 1778 to the mid nineteenth century. It argues that in
the first instance appreciative readers like Elizabeth Benger, Robert
Bisset, William Hayley and many others generate a dominant narrative in
which Burney is figured as offering her readers both intellectual solidity
and moral purity. This proved enabling for many women novelists (and other
writers), including Jane Austen, Elizabeth Blower and Eliza Taylor, and
reference to Burney in fiction rapidly became a coded language for distinguishing
between good and bad characters, especially female characters. As a result,
the example of Burney could also provide respectable camouflage to writers
such as Mary Robinson who were manifestly not themselves conventionally
respectable. Furthermore, it is argued that as the nineteenth century
progressed, Burney's cultural position shifted. Writers such as Mary Russell
Mitford and Maria Edgeworth show a new ambivalence about Burney, and the
essay concludes by analysing a novel of 1836 by Anne Marsh-Caldwell where
a Burneyan intertextuality actually indicts Burney and her age for false
moral and literary values. It also demonstrates the uniqueness of Burney's
position as a novelist appreciated by writers across the political spectrum,
from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane West.
{main text}
|
|
ISSN 1744-9618
