Staged Insensibility in Burney’s Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer: How a Playwright Writes Novels
Emily Hodgson Anderson, University of Southern California
Volume 17, no. 4, July 2005
©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
Frances Burney, studied almost solely for her novels, exemplifies the eighteenth-century female author with an intense, vexed personal investment in the theatre. She began attending the theatre well before she could read, counted David Garrick as a close friend, and was famous among family members for her acting abilities. She tried repeatedly to get her own play manuscripts produced and finally told her father that she had “all [her] life intended” to write for the stage. In fact, her entire career as a novelist is located within her attempts to succeed as a playwright; she was writing plays before she published Evelina (1778), and she was revising plays well after the publication of her last novel, The Wanderer (1814). … This article focuses on scenes of staged suffering in Burney’s novels in order to argue for a relationship between her novels and plays, which in turn resonates with Burney’s experiences as a novelist and a playwright.
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)
©McMaster University, 2015. This copyright covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article, including in electronic forms, reprints, translations, photographic reproductions, or similar. While reading for personal use is encouraged, Eighteenth-Century Fiction articles may not be reproduced, broadcast, published, or re-disseminated without the prior written permission of Eighteenth-Century Fiction at McMaster University. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material is not allowed. The copyright in this website includes without limitation the text, computer code, artwork, photographs, images, music, audio, video, and audio-visual material on this website and is owned by McMaster University. ©McMaster University 2015.