The Texture of Sympathy: Narrating Sympathetic Failure in Frances Burney’s Camilla and The Wanderer

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe hostile reaction to Frances Burney’s final novel has structured the narrative of her sixty-year literary career as one of decline. Recently, scholars have begun to explore the nature of Burney’s formal experiments to explain this narrative. This article contributes to these explorations through a focus on the formal techniques that Burney relies on to structure the relationship between her readers and her characters in her final two novels, Camilla and The Wanderer, drawing together scholarship about the history of sympathy with the conversation around Burney’s literary legacy. By placing Burney’s fiction in context within the shifting discourse about the nature of sympathy, I argue that Burney’s final two novels check their readers’ ability to sympathize with their heroines in order to push back against the dominant, but limiting, modes of sympathetic engagement.