The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing (review)

REVIEWS 381 to manifest new riches. "C'est un écrivain qui bouleverse les rapports traditionnellement admis entre le réel et l'imaginaire, l'écrit et l'oral, la graphie manuscrite et l'imprimé. [...] Livre vivant, il nous apprend qu'il n'est de livre qu'inachevé et qu'il n'est de vie qu'engagée dans l'histoire et le fantasme. Qu'il n'est aussi d'individu que multiple, éclaté, contradictoire," writes Michel Delon in the presentation, and the articles following provide ample and convincing evidence. Charles A. Porter Yale University Julia Epstein. The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women 's Writing . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. xii + 276pp. US$37.50 (cloth); US$16.25 (paper). Julia Epstein begins with Burney's name. She objects to "Fanny" and prefers "Frances" because the former, "a common and popular eighteenth-century woman's name, is a particularly diminutive, super-feminized, and private name. Indeed Burney has suffered from some critics who patronize and infantilize her and who thereby diminish or ignore her achievement" (p. 3). (Such critics would have treated her in the same way if she had been called, say, Jane.) "It is time," says Epstein, "to restore Bumey's given name." There is no logic here. It is better to continue to use the name Fanny, the name used not only by scornful critics but by all her family and friends, and the name she herself preferred. Diminutives are often signs of affection; Bumey regularly referred to her son Alexander as "Alex." This bother over the novelist's name gets the book off to a fussy and distracting start. Great significance is given to names and naming throughout the book; sometimes this concern is interesting, but more often it is of a currently modish kind. Thus any name which contains the letters "EL" is noted; we are asked to consider "the existentialist semiology of the name Ellis, "elle is"—a primal Burney statement of the quintessential thereness of the female in society" (p. 177). The other novels are ransacked for "EL" names, but Epstein does not see that her triumphant discovery that Camilla's name was changed from "Ariella" knocks her theory on the head. Has the theory negative importance? Is Jane Austen telling us something by giving only one of her heroines, Elinor, this "existential semiology"? This book, then, is a feminist critique of Bumey's work. By "feminist" Epstein means "an empowering discourse that permits critics to uncover the ways Burney's work was embedded in the eighteenth century's gender constructions." She admits it is a partial approach: each generation needs "to mine certain kinds of ore from literature" (p. 10). The ore which Epstein finds and mines in abundance is "the masked simmering rage of a conflicted but self-conscious social reformer" (p. 4). This is the heart of the book: "I have tried to uncover this indirect but endlessly erupting anger." The Iron Pen, however, has another intention: "The project of this book might be said to be to convert Burney from the status of a 'minor' writer to that of a 'major' writer" (p. 3). The inverted commas hint at an uneasiness which is at once made clear by the frank admission that the dread words "minor" and "major" "lean on issues of canonization ... and to use them begs the question that this study engages." Nevertheless Epstein wants to make this conversion. She wants to bring Burney's three last novels into the canon where Evelina probably is; and if four in the bed is a little crowded then it is the little 382 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:4 one (Evelina) and not the others who should roll out, since it is what Epstein calls, in an oddly moral phrase, "the aberrant text." The book argues that, contrary to critical opinion from 1778 (the publication date of Evelina) to the present day, Burney "got better and better" (Epstein usually tries to avoid such value-laden judgments) "as a narrative stylist and as a social theorist" (p. 10). The last novel is the best of all because it has the deepest "reservoirs of Bumeyan anger and frustrated...