Frances Burney: A Literary Life (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 609 sound, scholarly approach to the novel, which will be much appreciated both by students and their teachers, and it represents excellent value for a modest cost. Malcolm Cook University of Exeter Janice Farrar Thaddeus. Frances Burney: A Literary Life. Literary Lives. New York: St Martin's Press; London: Macmillan, 2000. xii + 263pp. ISBN 0-333-60763-5. This book is one of at least three full-length studies of Frances Burney which appeared in the year 2000—a token of intense interest which shows no sign of diminishing. It focuses closely on her development as a writer, effectively demonstrating the quiet energy with which she dealt with the social and literary assumptions of her time. Considering the exigencies of the life she led, the sheer volume of her work is amazing. Janice Farrar Thaddeus provides a vivid account of the special "female difficulties" that Burney encountered. Readers, however, may have some reservations about Thaddeus's approach to the fiction. Like some other critics, she sees Burney as "reinventing the novel" (p. 33)—but the early reception of her work does not really bear this out. She was clearly writing within contemporary expectation when Evelina hit the headlines. For Burney in the 1770s "novel" still meant what Fielding had called a "comic epic poem in prose"—the incorporation of a relatively simple story line such as the marriage plot into a glorious charivari of sensational and sometimes violent incidents, unpredictable developments and crises, eccentric behaviour, and wildly contrasting settings. The skill lay, as Thaddeus points out, in combining "a variety of incongruous elements, always ultimately controlling them" (p. 9). That the reading public of 1778 agreed with this estimate is clear from the enthusiastic reception of Evelina, but by 1814 the almost complete critical and commercial failure of her fourth novel, The Wanderer, suggests that the years since Camilla (1796) had seen a significant change in reader expectation, of which Burney was insufficiently aware, and which she was perhaps temperamentally unableto satisfy. This change, heralding among other things what we recognize as nineteenthcentury "realism," can still cause modern commentators on Burney, including Thaddeus, to slip into apology, even as they try to escape from the readiness of George Sherburn and Joyce Hemlow in the 1950s to judge Burney "against the realist tradition" (p. 4). In her important discussion in chapter 4, Thaddeus claims that Burney was also writing realistically, though in a world which modern readers do not easily recognize and should take account of. Thaddeus's own excellent commentary makes abundantly clear that this fiction needs no such excuses. In a significant passage, Thaddeus writes, "Readers have for two centuries fled to the saner worldofJane Austen" (p. 89), which suggests that they have been demanding Emma and MansfieldPark look-alikes during a period which has seen not only the immense range and variety of nineteenth-century fiction but the reaction to it in 610 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:4 later experimentation. Burney may have been neglected in the nineteenth century because she did not write like George Eliot; but she can surely hold her own as part of a continuing story which includes writers such as James Joyce and Flann O'Brien. To give Burney a better chance we should take a much longer view. Within the limits of her overview, however, Thaddeus effectively analyses Burney 's claims to originality in the context of her time. Her exploration of the predicament of women is more complex than that of Richardson; her female characters are often beset by less serious but more perplexing problems than attempts on their lives and virtue. Thaddeus also contends that in many ways her fiction is darker and more troubling than that of Fielding and Smollett. Harrel's suicide in Cecilia is particularly appalling, as is the brutal isolation of Juliet-Ellis in The Wanderer. Moreover, Burney was quite prepared at least once to temper the traditional happy ending—Cecilia's marriage is not a particularly fortunate one for her, and her future at the end of the novel is not very rosy. The book is perhaps most valuable for its searching analysis of Burney's essential emotional conflict—between contemporary standards of womanhood...