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Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Kim by Rudyard Kipling. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy. One of the great letter-writers and conversationalists of the period, Burney was also the author of the novels Cecilia and Camilla , and was a major influence on Jane Austen. Start earning points for buying books! Uplift Native American Stories. Frances Burney. The only novelist not to benefit from her innovations, it seems, was herself.
At the start of her career Burney had overridden her fears of public humiliation by publishing Evelina anonymously. She managed to compose the novel in secret at home over a period of up to eight or ten years, solicit a publisher via a go-between and keep herself entirely removed from the process of publication, so successfully that she neither knew when the book was published nor possessed a copy.
Burney observed the book's progress with surreal detachment, hearing it discussed at dinner parties, in bookshops, even at the family breakfast table, where her step-mother read aloud from the newspaper an advertisement for Evelina on its publication day, unaware that the author was sitting opposite. Her cover was blown within the first year, and Burney became a very nervous and reticent celebrity. Perhaps if she had remained anonymous, she would have turned out a series of delightful comedies in the Evelina manner — or poems or plays, or nothing at all.
What she did do was become more and more concerned with being seen to be a writer of impeccable morality. While this was of course constraining for Burney, it wasn't the total disaster some critics have made it out to be.
Her second novel, Cecilia , is in my opinion her best. The next year, she remained near her husband, who was fighting with French Royalists against Napoleon, and refused to flee Brussels when rumours swept through that Napoleon had won at Waterloo. She stayed to help nurse the English wounded who streamed off the battlefield for weeks afterward.
Final Years After her father's death in and her husband's death in , Frances Burney d'Arblay wrote no more fiction. Her literary effort until the end of her life focused on the Memoirs of Doctor Burney , published in , and the editing of her own now monumental papers, which were first published as the Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay after her death in She is buried at St Swithin's, Walcot, Bath, alongside her husband and son.
Modern Scholarly Interest Although heavily bowdlerized versions of the diaries and letters were published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it wasn't until Joyce Hemlow published her landmark biography, The History of Fanny Burney , in that the full impact of Burney's contribution to literature and letters began to be better appreciated.
Hemlow's volume Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney Madame d'Arblay , which covers the years from to , also made a great contribution to the contemporary recognition of Burney's canonical status. The remainder of Frances Burney's journals, complete for the first time, are currently being published in two series.
Critical appreciation of Frances Burney's novels and plays continues to grow, sparked by new interest in 18th-century women writers. Chisholm, Kate. Fanny Burney: Her Life. Davenport, Hester. London: Sutton, Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works.
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