clew's reviews: a book log

Evelina, Fanny Burney

In Which a young woman, beautiful, amiable, virtuous, timid and impetuous (young enough for that to be believable):

I am new to the world, and unused to acting for myself;-my intentions are never willfully blameable, yet I err perpetually!

unjustly scorned by those who should love her most--goes into the world and marries a rich lord after no worse trouble than sneers and embarassment. You'd expect her to have eyestrain, poor thing; it's an epistolary novel; in the heat of events I once paged back to see just how much she was supposed to have written her dear friend in the course of an evening. "Having to write letters" is a white-lie escape from social quandaries, in the plot.

An ur-Regency romance, if it isn't actually too early to be a Regency... everything but the form would be absolutely normal in the (highly constrained) Regency genre today.

We were then both seated; and, after a short pause, he said, "How to apologize for so great a liberty as I am upon the point of taking, I know not;-shall I, therefore, rely wholly upon your goodness, and not apologize at all?"

I only bowed.

Several times I thought serious trouble, nearly Gothic, was being foreshadowed; but no. (I shouldn't tell you that; the belief enlivened the telltale compression of the progress-bar.)

Jane Austen had a sharper pen, of course. Burney maybe doesn't like a sharp wit; her witty woman is almost always unkind with it. The humorous character is unAustenish, a coarse and cruel sea-captain. Perhaps not a Naval captain? There are a few courtesans who I thought stood up honourably; they escort her back to her friends when she gets lost in one of the obligatory pleasure-gardens. She's mortified when she finds out what's going on, but the women have kept her safe, and they have more fun quizzing her companions than terrified little Evelina.

Odd use: But Sir Clement is an impracticable man, and I never succeeded in any attempt to frustrate whatever he had planned. 'Impracticable' as 'one who cannot be practiced upon', I assume.

Bartleby.com has a page on Burney, from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21), q.v.:

Starting from the general plan laid down by Richardson, she limits, she adds, she modifies, until the result is something entirely different.

Project Gutenberg etext #6053

(The author, from the National Portrait Gallery of the UK.)

So wrote clew in Fiction (18th c.). | TrackBack