‘[T]o strike a little out of a road already so much beaten’: Gender, Genre, and the Mid-Century Novel

Abstract

When Frances Burney published Evelina (1778), she famously situated her foray into the ‘republic of letters’ in relation to the careers of an impressive list of male literary forebears.¹ ‘[E]nlightened’ by Samuel Johnson’s ‘knowledge’, ‘charmed’ by Jean -Jacques Rousseau, ‘softened’ by Samuel Richardson, and ‘exhilarated’ by Henry Fielding’s ‘wit’ and Tobias Smollett’s ‘humour’, Burney declared that she ‘presume[d] not to attempt pursuing the same ground’ that these eminent figures had ‘tracked’, for ‘imitation’ in ‘books’ could not ‘be shunned too sedulously’ (pp. 9, 8). Her decision partially to depart from the example of her august predecessors was not so much motivated by a lack of confidence in her abilities, however, as it was urged by her concern for the novel’s past and its future. In their efforts to establish the genre as a legitimate literary form, Burney argued, the novel’s most eloquent practitioners had unwittingly orchestrated its demise. By the late 1770s, fiction was no longer novel and rarely displayed the hallmarks of innovation that had once characterized its appeal. In developing alternative modes of story-telling and characterization to those deployed in older prose forms such as romance, novelists including Fielding, Johnson, and Richardson had closed off others. Thus, although these writers had ‘cleared’ prose fiction of the ‘weeds’ that had formerly inhibited its growth, they had ‘also culled the flowers’ that had made it so alluring. The novel’s path may have been ‘plain’ by 1778, according to Burney, but it was also ‘barren’ (p. 9).