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Burney Criticism: Family Romance, Psychobiography, and Social HistoryJulia Epstein The centrai issue that has propelled readings of Frances Burney's work, particularly her fiction, concerns her place in literary history. The four essays on Evelina collected in this special issue of EighteenthCentury Fiction ask a series of questions of the novel's eponymous heroine—what is her character? how does she achieve a social place? does she have her own voice? what is her relation to her creator?— that parallel the questions critics have posed concerning Burney's status as an architect of the English novel. Did she succumb to patriarchal constraints and write what she thought her father would approve, or did she deploy a subversive stragegy of indirection? How ambitious was she, and how rebellious? Did she simply reinvent and recombine elements from Richardsonian sentiment and Smollettian farce, or did she forge a new form for the woman's novel? Until fairly recently, Burney was safely ensconced as a minor novelist and major diarist of the later eighteenth century; survey courses often included Evelina and some selections from the journals in their reading lists. The later novels and the plays were virtually ignored, and almost unavailable . A number of things have occurred over the last twenty years to change this situation and to call more attention to Burney. First, the journals and letters began to appear in definitive editions, a project now almost complete. Then, feminist critics such as Patricia Meyer Spacks and EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 4, July 1991 278 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Katharine Rogers began to write about Burney's achievement, and Judith Lowder Newton and Susan Staves published new and influential interpretations of Evelina. This early feminist work has been followed, especially in the last four years, by a spate of books and articles on Burney's novels, including work by well-known eighteenth-century scholars such as Mary Poovey, Kristina Straub, Terry Castle, Margaret Anne Doody, and John Richetti. One of the plays, A Busy Day, was published (Burney's dramatic works remain underread and largely unavailable except in manuscript), Camilla came back into print, and new paperbound editions of Cecilia and The Wanderer are now available. The shelves of bookstores and libraries finally abound with Burney's writings and criticism of them, and it is no longer necessary to know her married name—d'Arblay—to find this material. The vexed problem of locating Burney in eighteenth-century literary history is intimately connected to the ambiguity concerning the name her works were filed under, an issue lent new interest by the recent shift to using "Frances" rather than the diminutive "Fanny" as the writer's given name. It is not, then, merely coincidence that makes naming a central subject of the essays by Amy Pawl, Susan Greenfield, Gina Campbell, and David Oakleaf. A curious debate emerges from these four essays: does Evelina seek the restoration of the name of the father as an entrée into patriarchal authority and self-authorship, or does she derive her social power precisely from her ownership of her wronged mother's name, and thus her claim to a privately defined character? Is a recognized patronym the key to public identity and social acceptance, or can matrilineal descent endow a heroine with covert creative gifts? The battle of the sexes in these essays has become the battle of parents over the personhood of daughters. The recognition or reconciliation scene between Evelina and Belmont , a wonderfully melodramatic turning point in the novel, figures importantly in each of the essays here. Pawl argues that naming confers or affirms public identity, and that Evelina finally diffuses her loss of autonomy by distributing her allegiances among several father figures. Greenfield, in contrast, asserts that "a woman is most herself when most removed from men" (p. 316), and that Evelina mythologizes her matrilineage through the name of the mother, in whose voice she literally speaks in the recognition scene. Both Greenfield and Campbell agree that Burney 's public success subsequent to the publication of Evelina produced a mixed legacy: her name recognition and paternal acceptance caused her to lose her literary independence as she subordinated her subversive impulses and became what...

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