Cecilia (review)

80 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Fanny Burney. Cecilia. Edited by Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody with an introduction by Margaret Anne Doody. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. xlviii + 1004pp. $17.50. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody's scholarly edition of Cecilia, arguably Burney's most feminist novel, is a welcome addition to the roster of available eighteenth-century texts. Cecilia presents a heroine who is not only beautiful but also intelligent, capable, well-intentioned, and potentially rich. In telling the story of her protagonist's struggle to use her capabilities to live a useful life, Burney exposes the destructive values of her society, especially as they affect women. Doody's introduction to the volume gives useful information about the composition of the novel, its initial reception, and its place in the Burney canon. In her critical assessment she emphasizes the novel as the "examination of a whole society as a structure and a system." Doody suggests that Burney, like Dickens, is more interested in depicting a panorama of characters warped by a social system too powerful for them to control than in developing a single character. In Cecilia we see "Augustan dreams denied by Georgian realities." Doody points out Burney's telling use of the issue of family name as an image both for patrilineal and class systems, an issue which becomes "a serious parodie presentation of class considered as pure essence." Doody notes that Mortimer Delvile, Cecilia 's eventual husband, is an indecisive hero. This is indeed true and points to a leitmotifof the novel, a novel more insistently feminist than Doody's introduction indicates. Despite its caustic treatment of many of the characters, the women are depicted, almost uniformly, as superior to the men not only in moral character but in general intelligence and capability. In striking contrast to both Evelina and Camilla who, in their novels, are seen as needing the strength and wisdom of their respective spouses, Cecilia herself shows far greater moral strength than Mortimer, and in a crisis is more decisive and practical. Likewise, the elder Mrs Delvile is superior in every way to her husband. The pattern continues in the sub-plots where a sister is clearly the superior of a spoiled brother, and so on. Cecilia is remarkably outspoken about the ability of women not only to equal but to surpass men. This edition of the novel is based upon the first edition of 1782 with the minor stylistic changes Burney made for the second edition of 1783 indicated in notes. Although Doody makes a spirited case that Burney should be referred to as "Frances" since calling her "Fanny" is a twentieth-century custom and diminishes Burney's authority, Oxford University Press was apparently unwilling to make this change. It is too bad that they could not exercise leadership in a small but important matter. As Doody points out, Burney would never have permitted herself to be identified in public by a family nickname. Cecilia was identified only as "by the author of Evelina"; Burney did not use her name in publishing either novel. REVIEWS 81 Sabor and Doody have annotated liberally, explaining literary references and terms not necessarily familiar to the general reader, and provided as well a select bibliography, a chronology of Bumey, and several useful appendices. The appendix on "London" briefly summarizes the social geography of the city in Burney's day, indicating the connotations for an eighteenth-century reader of the place names used in the novel. An appendix on finance not only explains pounds, shillings, and pence together with the ramifications of Cecilia's financial situation, but suggests that for very approximate modem equivalents, the sums in the novel should be multiplied by "at least sixty." The problems of constructing an eighteenth-century "market basket" and then calculating a fair equivalence in modem pounds is indeed complicated. Sixty seems a well-educated guess, but it might be interesting to hear from readers about their own approximations— a subject of interest to us all. A final appendix on "Fashionable Amusements," prepared with the assistance of Melinda Finberg, briefly describes public places of amusement in Cecilia's London and general social customs. Scholars will undoubtedly prefer this edition...