The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney (review)

For very good reasons explained in this excellent collection, until late in the last century, the full story of Frances Burney’s career remained obscure. By the end of the nineteenth century, her reputation had been all but destroyed, and many of her collected works were inaccessible or out of print. Indeed, as George Justice provocatively asserts, ‘Burney’s career as an author might be labeled as a failure.’ But lately things have certainly changed – witness the 2005 dedication of a commemorative window in Westminster Cathedral in Burney’s honour. The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney contributes to this recent reappraisal by conveying a wealth of information on all aspects of Burney’s career and by raising key issues that will preoccupy Burney scholars for decades to come. The ten essays, plus an introduction, are uniformly well-written, informative, and mostly lively. They cover Burney’s family, novels, plays, journals, and letters, as well as her politics, stance on gender, society, and the literary marketplace. The essays sometimes overlap, but the result is to reinforce, not repeat, vital themes.

One such theme is the necessity of considering Burney within the context of her family history. Kate Chisholm leads off the collection with a comprehensive overview of the Burney family, one that should prompt scholars to attend to the more than ten thousand items of correspondence produced by the family. George Justice reinforces Chisholm’s assertion that Burney cannot be known without her family, in his essay on Burney’s conflicted attitude toward the literary marketplace. Betty Rizzo similarly highlights Burney’s familial networks in order to contextualize her attitudes toward society. In Rizzo’s account the Burney family station left the writer ‘suspended in the same ambiguity of station’ for all of her life. In Margaret Doody’s essay on Burney and politics, once again we find the emphasis on the Burneys: the fact of Catholicism in the family background facilitated Frances’s ‘attention to the place and experience of “outsiders,” to what it means to be “alien” or alienated.’

Though it is a truism that, during the eighteenth century, all women writers struggled with gender prejudice, Burney seems to have struggled even more, divided as she was between the desire to maintain a ladylike decorum and to pursue a shrewd course of business. Vivien Jones reinforces this point in her essay by arguing that Burney’s ‘particular achievement was to attract respect as a female intellectual on the basis of works of fiction.’ Yet other essays show how very difficult that project was. Lorna Clark recounts, in fascinating detailing, the viciousness of Burney’s male reviewers, and she points out the obstacles that persisted before a full recovery was achieved.

The essays in the Companion collectively insist on seeing Burney’s oeuvre in its entirety. Wiltshire finds merit in the collective journals and letters, arguing that Burney embodies ‘the condition of modernity in which history is enacted through the experience of the private subject.’ A case is even made for Burney’s unreadable tragedies. Tara Ghoshal Wallace concedes their lack of poetic virtue, but assures us that ‘they certainly reward the kind of scrupulous readings they have begun to accrue.’

Individual chapters address Burney’s better-known novels and discuss her works by genre. Jane Spencer makes a good argument for reading Evelina and Cecilia against Samuel Johnson, while Sarah Salih, who has previously blazed the way by reading Burney’s racial tropes, highlights performance in Cecilia and The Wanderer. She astutely asks, ‘How stable are class, gender, nationality, even race – when they can be donned and discarded as easily as a bonnet or a collection of patches?’ George Justice turns our attention to the power of the marketplace, revealing a Burney who may or may not have had control, but who tried to put business matters first.

This collection is an excellent starting point for anyone embarked on study of Burney’s life, works, and place in the canon. The essays are accessible, full...