From Propensity to Profession: Female Authorship and the Early Career of Frances Burney
Betty Schellenberg, Simon Fraser University
Volume 14, no. 3-4, April-July 2002
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In recent decades feminist literary critics have been intrigued by Frances Burney’s early publishing career, beginning with the appearance of Evelina in January of 1778, when Burney first became the subject of public attention, through the writing and suppression of her first stage comedy, The Witlings, to the publication of Cecilia; or The Memoirs of an Heiress in July of 1782. Supported by Burney’s letters and journals, these readings have often focused on the eighteenth-century woman’s experience of authorship. We are particularly indebted to Kristina Straub’s analysis of the doubleness of Burney’s early fictions, to Margaret Anne Doody’s literary biography, and to Julia Epstein’s identification of Burney’s anger for an understanding of the tensions between late eighteenth-century prescriptions for the domestic woman’s behaviour and a desire to comment publicly on contemporary society. Straub’s and Doody’s studies also emphasize social class as a consideration inseparable from that of gender in the formation of Burney’s authorial identity; Catherine Gallagher’s analysis of patterns of naming, namelessness, and debt in Evelina and Cecilia has elaborated convincingly upon this account. These important studies nevertheless rely upon questionable parallels between the social and economic circumstances of Burney’s young heroines of gentry status and education with the author’s own experience as one “raised to the trade” of authorship, the relatively young, unmarried daughter of a family making a place for itself in an emerging literary-professional class. In other words, a common strategy of early feminist treatments has been to understand Burney’s career as typical of the proper woman writer. In the terms of this model, Burney’s psychic and professional survival necessitated splitting off her identity as female writer from the models of female propriety which she endorsed in her writing.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Frances Burney” include:
“Black, Patched and Pennyless”: Race and Crime in Burney’s The Wanderer
by TARA CZECHOWSKI (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Dangerous Fortune-telling in Frances Burney’s Camilla
by JENNIFER LOCKE (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Volume 24, Number 3 (Spring 2012)
Rewriting Radicalism: Wollstonecraft in Burney’s The Wanderer
by TARA GHOSHAL WALLACE (ECF 24.3, Spring 2012)
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