Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (review)

REVIEWS 163 use of the indices. To pursue a study of Captain Singleton, for example, one must track down ninety-nine references scattered throughout the text from 1787 to 1924. In spite of these limitations, the answer to the question of whether or not Peterson 's reference guide provides a useful addition to Defoe studies is clear: a resounding affirmative. Its listings for the years it covers are far more comprehensive than any previous Defoe bibliography. Its annotations are accurate, sensible, and detailed. It supplements the Stoler bibliography as intended and, more important, fulfils the compiler's purpose of illustrating the evolution of Defoe 's reputation. Spiro Peterson has produced a major reference tool ofenormous usefulness for researchers working at all levels on Defoe. John A. Stoler University of Texas—San Antonio Margaret Anne Doody. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. xvii + 441pp. US$40.00 cloth; US$14.00 paper. Margaret Anne Doody's Frances Burney: The Life in the Works is a monumental , scrupulously researched, and highly readable study of this popular and important novelist of the latter years of the eighteenth century. Doody impassionately yet persuasively argues that "Fanny" Bumey can no longer be identified by and studied under this diminishing name. She is no longer the "Little Bumey" of the lines published in March 1782 in the Morning Herald (p. 100). Doody develops her analysis of Burney's name into a major thematic focus, concentrating on her numerous personae. As she observes: There is a nice irony in all this ado about her name, for she herself is extremely conscious of the significance of names. Almost every one of her novels or plays deals with the name problem as it affects a woman. Indeed, a woman's problematic relation to society is signified by her name, and her name is part of a woman's problem. Who a woman is does not square with what she is called, (p. 6) It is to "square" the record, so to speak, that Doody writes. Her biographical and analytical study is divided into ten chapters that move from biography to a critical scrutiny of each major work. Perhaps the most startling of the chapters is that dealing with The Witlings, her early comedy, for recent scholarship has ignored this important work. Doody begins by clearly placing Burney's works within the context of her life and that of contemporary society. Berating such critics as Austin Dobson, 164 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION who saw Evelina as emerging from the orderly pattern of Burney's tranquil existence , she swiftly evokes the complexity of contemporary society and defines the tensions in Burney's life. The relationship with her father especially—both as it really existed and in her recreation of it—haunts Bumey. She makes her father "publicly perfect, embalming him as a faultless hero" (p. 10), thus simultaneously making herself the faultless daughter. In telling Burney's story Doody has had to include the story of her father's career as well. So Doody recounts the tale of his childhood abandonment, the death of his twin sister, his hatred of Sir John Hawkins, his desire for approval, and especially his toadying to people of power. Charles Bumey, Doody concludes, always needed permission to act; "he was a moral Micawber in approaching any matter that involved confronting and changing the mind of some other person, especially a superior" (p. 17). This characteristic, however, did not mark his relationship with his children. Here, Charles Bumey exercised power and expected to be the superior. Frances Burney's great problem, Doody tells us (pp. 21-22), is that she did not distinguish herself in her nursery career, and consequently, never fully gained her father's favour and approval in the long years of her adult life. Like Mary Shelley , she knew tremendous depths of loneliness (and like Mary Shelley, elopement became a pervasive theme in her works.) Her father's remarriage seemed like a betrayal to Frances, as did each loss of a sibling or friend to marriage; each time she was thrown back to an emotional reliance on her father. But Doody carefully demonstrates that Bumey was...