For the historical linguist of English, Burney’s extraordinary body of extant prose presents an exciting opportunity to study idiolectal change and continuity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Burney’s long life, consistent writing habit, and large body of digitized text have enabled an idiolectal corpus of over 3 million words of prose to be compiled. This paper reports the findings of computational linguistic research conducted using this corpus, using statistical modelling to examine Burney’s use of dual-form adverbs. This modelling highlights Burney’s responsiveness to targeted linguistic prescriptivism, showing that she made widespread and persistent idiolectal reforms to an adverb paradigm highlighted in a 1796 review of Camilla by the Monthly Review. The modelling also reveals that this change did not spread by analogy to other adverb paradigms. These results highlight the potential for computational research to facilitate explorations into the extent, complexity, and nuance of Burney’s responsiveness to external stimuli, such as overt prescriptions or more subtle markers of sociolinguistic prestige.
Miss Margland, a minor governess character in Frances Burney’s 1796 novel Camilla, is rarely discussed by literary critics. This article, which engages with recent critical examinations of Burney’s work in relation to Bildung and the marriage plot, argues that Miss Margland’s peripherality, insignificance and incompetence enable her to draw attention to the inhibitions that social and narrative conventions place upon the complex and meaningful development of women. The theories of Pierre Bourdieu are used both to highlight the governess’s particular investment in misrecognizing the economic foundations of cultural dominance, and to show how her wielding of unofficial power allows her to reveal the rules and paradoxes governing courtship and marriage. Sustained comparisons between Miss Margland and Camilla demonstrate how the governess acts as a catalyst for the heroine’s Bildung, and exposes the injustice of being compelled to submit to social codes and behaviors that limit women’s education and development.
The two famous portraits of Frances Burney, painted by her cousin Edward Francisco Burney in the 1780s, are recontextualized in light of the author’s discovery in 2021 of a mural inspired by the portraits, painted by the art duo id-iom in a pub in the Streatham area of southwest London. The article uses material heuristics to address the transmodalization of celebrity culture and sociability in a contemporary pop artwork. The article is accompanied by an interview with id-iom.
The business of books, in the Romantic Period in Britain, was a pan-European affair. A new kind of publisher began marketing fiction on both sides of the Channel. The resulting competition to publish novels – and series of “classic”, “popular” and “modern” works for eager readers – involved multiple agents. In this article, I look at Sarah Harriet Burney’s relationships with London-based publishers and booksellers the Robinsons, Henry Colburn, Dulau and Thomas Tegg. I argue that she is an author whose career should be read in the context of work on women writers’ understanding of themselves as “professionals”. In examining some intriguing passages from Sarah Harriet’s correspondence as well uncovering evidence provided by rare books, and publishers’ archival material, I reveal her talents as an accomplished networker, and as one who played a mediatory role for publishers on the make. Sarah Harriet is revealed, too, as an editor and translator of fiction, and as a writer who contributes to the extensive cross-Channel exchange in the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.
Charles Burney, patriarch of the Burney family, wrote hundreds of occasional poems during his long lifetime. While many of these verses celebrate intimate family occasions, others were tactical advances in Burney’s lifelong professional and social upward striving, which reached its apex in the first years of the nineteenth century when three generations of Burney gentlemen – Charles Burney Sr., Charles Burney Jr., and Charles Parr Burney – inscribed their verses into the White Album at Crewe Hall, thereby joining a scribal society of social, political, and cultural elites in offering tribute to their hostess Frances Greville Crewe, a great beauty, wit, aristocratic Whig hostess, and lifelong friend and patroness of Burney. (A misattribution of one of those poems is corrected.)
At the height of its popularity, Burney’s Evelina was frequently republished in English both in Britain by the copyright holder Lowndes and outside of its borders and the sphere of influence of British copyright law, notably in Ireland. This essay reveals that the only bibliography of Burney’s works by Joseph Grau (1981) did not correctly document the true extent of the novel’s production by these two most important sources supplying the book to Anglophone readers. It uncovers the number and variety of Evelina’s editions and reprints produced by the publishing house of Thomas and William Lowndes (15) and their Irish counterparts (7) for different segments of the English-speaking book market in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Evelina’s corrected early publication history demonstrates a fuller and more complex picture of its reach to and popularity among the reading public in Britain and abroad, underestimated until now.
This article explores connections between musical performance, race, and social status in Sarah Harriet Burney’s novels, Geraldine Fauconberg, Clarentine and Traits of Nature. It examines representations of white music-making in Clarentine before comparingthe uneasy relationship Burney sets up among music, social class, and race in Geraldine Fauconberg alongside depictions of race in her bestseller, Traits of Nature. Chronologically, Burney’s novels shift from a positive representation of musical accomplishment in Clarentine to a more negative representation in Traits of Nature. Burney’s racial attitudes can be viewed through the lens of music-making. In this vein, there are similarities between Black characters and musically accomplished women as both are subject to a specific type of scrutiny which Burney deplores. Contemporary racial theory and Burney’s background are considered alongside episodes of music-making and representations of Black characters in the novels.
New words appear as a result of emergent patterns in contemporary speech and literary works. This essay re-evaluates the well-worn antagonism between living language and coalescing standards of English grammar in the eighteenth century within Frances Burney’sfirst novel, Evelina (1778), where this conflict emerges as a uniquely gendered problem. I argue that the novel presents the tension between its two senses of “propriety,” correctness in both a social and semantic sense, in its depiction of the speech and behavior of women. Attending to a narrator who calls herself and her compositions “particular” allows us to grasp the import of Burney’s neologisms in Evelina as well as their reception amid the broader aesthetic and philological debates of her time.
Frances Burney d’Arblay’s original will of 6 March 1839, housed at the National Archives, Kew, has hitherto remained unseen by Burney scholars. This article provides an annotated transcription, followed by photographs of the document. We have identified, as far as possible, all the individuals named in the will and have also clarified, in our commentary, Burney’s references to financial matters, while elucidating various obscurities and legal complications. We demonstrate that the will was drawn up jointly by the imaginative novelist Burney and her lawyer Alfred Turner: an odd collaboration, which produced a highly idiosyncratic document. We also indicate the relationship between the will and an undated memorandum written by Burney as a form of rudimentary testamentary instructions for Turner.
This article concerns an incident, recounted in Frances Burney’s Journals, about a visit to the Devon coast in 1817. While staying in the seaside town of Ilfracombe, Burney was caught by the tides on a solitary walk and had to climb onto a high rock for safety, where sheremained for several hours in tempestuous conditions in serious danger of drowning. She was accompanied only by her small dog Diane, who plays a significant role in the story. Ever since it was published, her “Ilfracombe Journal” has been popular amongst readers, and new layers of meaning are added when it is read alongside artistic representations of women at the seashore. The unique features of Burney’s account include a sense of suspense and danger that draws on narrative elements from the Gothic tradition, in combination with a realistic rendering of a woman’s confrontation with the elements.
Drawing on George Haggerty’s Queer Gothic, Lee Edelman’s No Future, and Jose Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, this paper positions The Wanderer as both a female gothic and a queer gothic text through its representations of sapphism and its critique of the marriage narrative and reproductive futurity. In The Wanderer, Burney locates Juliet’s (who also goes by the Incognita, L.S. and Ellis) source of gothic horror in the marriage plot and the obligation of women to embrace reproductive futurity. However, Juliet’s escape from her coerced marriage represents only a part of the novel’s larger refusal of linear life paths and sexual developmental narratives. For both Mr. Ireton and Sir Jaspar Harrington, reproductive futurity unravels itself. It generates the gothic specter of male disempowerment—figured equally through marriage and its avoidance—that prevents both men from achieving it, and this resistance to reproductive futurity compounds the novel’s queer gothic narrative bent. The article ends by tracing Elinor’s trajectory from Wollstonecraftian radical to someone obsessed with gender normativity and marriage. When marriage becomes foreclosed, Elinor becomes a wanderer who enacts her own unique, queer path.
While recent studies of Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) have tended to focus upon female intellectual enlightenment as a developmental process that takes place within social contexts, this essay argues that female intellectual capacity in these novels is innate and associated with rural isolation. This inherent female intelligence ultimately serves to contradict stereotypical, eighteenth-century associations of rurality with ignorance. Through presenting rural isolation as the subtext of their novels, this essay elucidates what may be understood as a methodological use of rural isolation as a means of discussing female intellectual capacity and the implications of its innateness within the eighteenth-century, female-authored novel.
