A scholarly biography focusing on the literary career of the
pioneering novelist (17521840).Thaddeus (History and
Literature/Harvard) begins with an anxious moment: returning to
England from France in 1812, Burney is confronted by a police
officer who demands to know the significance of the myriad
manuscript pages she has. (They are in fact three volumes of her
novel-in-progress, The Wanderer.) But a strong and confident Burney
cows the official, controlling him as easily as she manipulates her
texts. There have been, asserts Thaddeus, three principal critical
views of Burney: a writer who fears to do no wrong, one who
represses her rage, and one who unleashes her rage. To understand
her work more comprehensively, it is necessary, says Thaddeus, to
employ all three. Having established this critical framework,
Thaddeus proceeds through the life of protean Burney, following her
from childhood in her close, artistic family to the publication of
her first novel (the epistolary Evelina) to her second and even
more popular novel Cecilia (with its half-mad narrator) to her
dreary life as an attendant to Queen Charlotte (a position that
made her so frail with misery that she nearly died), and on through
her marriage, motherhood, celebrity (among her fans were Byron,
Scott, and Godwin), and later works (including an ill-reviewed
play, Edwy and Elgiva). Thaddeus provides an important service by
summarizing and analyzing Burneys little-known workssometimes more
thoroughly than engagingly. But readers will emerge convinced of
both the importance and novelty of Burneys work. Thaddeus also
reveals humor and irony and pain in Burneys life (e.g., her future
husband wrote a paean to the joys of masturbation, and with only a
wine cordial anesthetic, she endured a brutal mastectomy).
Thaddeuss meticulous research and sound argument should secure for
Burney a more prominent place in the pride of literary lions.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Emphasizing Frances Burney's professionalism and her courage, the
author of this work aims to show the protean writer who recognized
her abilities and exercised them, always carefully shaping her
career. Though now frequently depicted as retiring, even fearful,
Burney forced on her reading public themes they were scarcely ready
for, flamboyantly mixing genres, writing comically about intimate
violence. Not content in old age to be merely a literary icon, she
privately recorded with increasing clarity the moments when the
world lacerates the self.
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