Oh Dear Resemblance of Thy Murdered Mother: Female Authorship in Evelina
Susan C. Greenfield, Fordham University
Volume 3, no. 4, July 1991
©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’s first published novel, Evelina (1778), is a story about an orphan girl’s quest for identity and her development as a writer. The novel traces the heroine’s search for a parental author who can name her and establish her position in the world; at the same time, since the text is epistolary and most of the letters are written by Evelina, the heroine herself is an author. In this essay I examine Evelina‘s representation of authorship in each sense of the term and argue that identity and literary power are depicted as matrilineal gifts. I also suggest that the book’s female-centred family romance parallels both Burney’s personal myth about her own writing and her culture’s narrative about the origins of the novel as a genre.
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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