‘Unconscious of her own double appearance’: Fanny Burney’s Brighton

Abstract

Better known for her literary representations of Georgian London, Fanny Burney’s final, post-revolutionary novel, The Wanderer (1814), extends a more complex and radical geography than her earlier works. Opening on a rough sea off the coast of France, the mysterious protagonist, Ellis/Juliet, feels the gravitational pull of Brighthelmstone (Brighton), the celebrated Regency seaside town that provides the setting for most of the novel. This chapter examines the representation of Brighton in The Wanderer, a novel in which the inhabitants of Brighthelmstone quite literally turn their back on the ocean, alongside Burney’s descriptions of the town in her private writings over a number of decades. What emerges from these different genres is a double vision of Brighton that counters contemporary and popular depictions of the town in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.