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Abstract
Abstract: Most gothic scholarship argues that London did not serve as a setting for gothic fiction until the Victorian era. However, as this essay demonstrates, Frances Burney's Cecilia (1782) prefigures what has been categorized as the Victorian urban gothic. Burney depicts London as a gothicized space for a woman navigating the dysphoria and disorientation of the eighteenth-century marriage market. Via the urban gothic, Burney explores the spatial and narrative trajectories of her heroine in ways that investigate possibilities for women’s urban mobility and that critique problems with marriage and the marriage plot. Ultimately, Burney’s prefiguration of the urban gothic subverts the marriage plot as a device of closure. The open-endedness of the unconventional marriage plot allows readers to envision other spatial and narrative trajectories that could be available to the heroine.
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