Abstract
Frances Burney’s protagonists, spanning 36 years, are the quintessential Heroines of Disinterest. Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796), and The Wanderer (1814) are all investigations of the possibilities and perils faced by disinterested women in a misogynist, self-interested world—one deeply interested, in fact, in maintaining women’s mental and economic dependence. This chapter analyzes Burney’s first two novels, Evelina and Cecilia, to explore that world, for the two novels, written five years apart, are a pair: One the story of an heiress ascending, the other of one descending. Together, they plot out the varied possibilities for disinterest, and consequently identity, within the context of dispossession (Evelina), of assured wealth (Cecilia) and of the loss of the wealth (the conclusion of Cecilia) upon which an identity has been constructed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a description of Evelina as a fairy tale, particularly in its depiction of Lord Orville, see, for example, Lillian and Edward A. Bloom, “Fanny Burney’s Novels: The Retreat from Wonder,” Novel 12 (1979), 215–35
Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 39–41.
Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 20.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)
Ruth Perry, Novel Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 214.
Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry Into the Duties of the Female Sex, 1797 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 362.
James Fordyce, Sermons for Young Women, 1766 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 35.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757, ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1958), 42–3.
Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, 1773 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 71.
Adam Smith, The Theory ofMoral Sentiments, 1759, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 190–1
Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 98.
Qtd. in Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 215.
Henry Home Kames, Elements of Criticism, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: John Bell and William Creek;London: T. Cadell and G. Robinson, 1785), 61–2.
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, eds. John W. and Jean S. Yolton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)
Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel ofDevelopment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 53.
Edward Copeland, Women WritingAbout Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, eds. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 208.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), 23.
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: Gender, Property, and the Rise of the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 235.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 334.
Copyright information
© 2009 Virginia H. Cope
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cope, V.H. (2009). Burney’s Heroines of Disinterest. In: Property, Education, and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230239548_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230239548_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-30581-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-23954-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)