The Radical Work of Frances Burney's London

In the preface to her first and most successful novel Evelina (1778), Frances Burney offers a defense of the novel that is finally less a defense than a prescription for rescuing the genre from its current “depravity.” Conceding that the novel’s reputation cannot be reckoned independently of the legitimating efforts of Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Rousseau, and Johnson, Burney insists at the same time that both the fate of the novel and its much-needed recuperation rest with novelists like herself—novelists (who may or may not be women themselves) writing chiefly for women—whose responsibility is to retrieve the genre from “the fantastic regions of Romance.” ¹ In place of the “Marvellous,” therefore, which has had a deleterious effect on young women who, in reading novels, are somehow imbued with foolish expectations that may likely lead to “injury,” Burney urges both novelists and novels to seek “aid from sober Probability” (p. 8). Burney, for her part, has sought this aid, so much that in the pages that follow she has stanched the “contagion” to which the novel has become increasingly tantamount through her use of characters “draw[n]...from nature” and her depiction of “manners of the times” (p.7). Thus, in giving us a character who is “but the offspring of Nature and Nature in her simplest attire” (p. 8), Burney additionally makes that character’s narratable “history,” specifically her education by “entrance into the world,” a virtual allegory for the desired function of fiction in the present time. Evelina’s “history,” whether it be a series of experiences or a series of narratable events, now serves to approximate and inculcate truth rather than fantasy.

Burney may have been among the first female writers to urge the claim of probability as a representational desideratum, ² but she was scarcely the last. Writing just seven years later in 1785, Clara Reeve took the bolder tack of describing and ultimately privileging the novel as a genre distinct from romance. Where “Romance,” according to Reeve, is “an heroic fable which treats of fabulous persons and things,” the novel “is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written.” ³ Where romance “describes what never happened nor is likely to happen,” the novel

gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own.

(p. 111)

In admitting to the suasive dimension of the novel, Reeve points with striking candor to a potential problem or contradiction regarding the novel as a genre distinct from romance. If the novel, as Reeve maintains, stands in virtual opposition to romance, it does so as much by an appeal to what is probable or natural as by resembling its counterpart. The novel, in other words, can only oppose romance and the work of romance by becoming, or by otherwise assimilating, romance through the mechanism of what, as Reeve describes it, is more properly naturalization. For in naturalization the everyday or the real is more a means by which the reader is absorbed and variously deceived than a subject matter that, as Reeve suggests, is necessarily delimiting or even accurate. Less an index of what is really “out there” in the world, the probable, as Reeve both conceives and endorses it, is actually a screen or overlay for what is still, at some level, the impossible. It is a typology of sorts by which the joys or distresses of persons in the story appear “as if they were our own” precisely because they are not our own: because “what never happened nor is likely to happen” to the reader has, with an assist from probability, been given a temporary reprieve from appearing...