Frances Burney (Re)reads The Winter's Tale: Women's ‘Nature’ and Sociability in Evelina and The Woman-Hater

Abstract

The article examines two works by Frances Burney: her debut novel Evelina (1778) and one of her later plays The Woman-Hater (1800–1802) as appropriations of and returns to the tropes present in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (1623). The investigations explore Burney's particular interest in the roles allotted to women within familial sociability at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while the adaptive strategies employed by her are scrutinised to highlight their potential of questioning the existing social paradigms and power structures. The conclusions show that the literary dialogue into which Burney entered with earlier authors both reflected and prompted social change occurring at the time of the production of the novel and the play.