The Literary Afterlife of Frances Burney and the Victorian Periodical Press

Abstract

The publication of the Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (1842) converts Frances Burney from a hazy recollection to an iconic figure of the recent past. Once a literary phenomenon responsible for best sellers such as Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), novels whose widespread market appeal matched their critical acclaim, Burney died in 1840, leaving behind seven volumes of her personal journals not only intact but primed for the press. When these intimate writings were printed two years later, it altered the posthumous reception of Frances Burney irrevocably. Captivating the Victorian public imagination with first-hand accounts of a Georgian woman who had shot from anonymity to literary celebrity, hobnobbed with the literati of her day, and taken a position in the court of King George III, her diary was instantly a success. At the same time, it opened the door for critics to re-evaluate this novelist in light of her private life. As the critics reviewed each successive volume over the next five years, however, they not only infused their assessment of the writer’s work with that of her personal life, but made the periodical press into the principal site for a negotiation of Frances Burney’s literary afterlife. A detailed examination of the press response to Burney during the Victorian period not only clarifies the varied incarnations that emerge in her literary reception. It also reveals a complex dynamic through which the permutations of a celebrity afterlife become fused with a project of self-valuation that originates with individual periodicals and their writers but gradually extends to encompass the whole genre of the periodical press itself. As Leo Braudy explains: