Fanny Burney by Judy Simons (review)

Book Reviews253 comparing theories and terms is admirable. He gives extensive opportunity for the scholar to pursue further research through references to related works, often across disciplines. It is perhaps the complexity of the work which constitutes its weaknesses. First, the book is geared to an audience which is well grounded in theoretical linguistics. This work is quite unlike John Lyon's work on Chomsky which offered those who were familiar with Chomsky an avenue through which they could gain access to the important concepts of his work and thus gain confidence to tackle the original. Secondly, the author attempts to integrate the work of other theorists with that of Greimas. In order to do so, he had to introduce distinctions in terminology attributable to each theorist. Take for example, "immanence" and "manifestation" or "langue and parole" which he explains Hjelmslev describes as "system" and "process" and Chomsky refers to as "competence" and "performance" (82). Although such distinctions are necessary to situate Greimas' work in its intellectual context, one must continually refer back to definitions to assure proper interpretation. In sum, Ronald Schleifer is to be applauded for the compilation of Greimas' work in relation to its intellectual context and the examination of the work in relation to the latest developments in literary criticism. However, he may find that his audience is limited to those seeking to strengthen their existing knowledge in the field. JANE E. AVERILL Emporia State University JUDY SIMONS. Fanny Burney. Women Writers Series. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1987. 153 p. In "Towards a Feminist Poetics," Elaine Showalter remarks that especially before the mid-nineteenth century "The feminist content of feminine art is typically oblique, displaced, ironic and subversive; one has to read it between the lines ..." (Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus, Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1979, 35.) Judy Simons' Fanny Burney demonstrates both the value and pitfalls of reading between the lines to discover what Showalter calls "the missed possibilities of the text." Not all writers are ironic, and once Simons establishes that Burney "misses the opportunities to exploit the ironic potential of the authorial tone" (63) in the novels following her epistolary first novel, Evelina, Simons' reading of the spaces struggles to reconcile itself with the printed lines. Fanny Burney's novels are often so openly satiric of her environment that Simons' effort to account for Burney's many submissive and hierarchicallysupportive statements as "outward orthodoxy [which] concealed a revolutionary spirit" (17) seems inconsistent. The book's strongest offering is its presentation of Fanny Burney, the private, self-fulfilling writer of Evelina and the diaries confronting the publicly acclaimed and scrutinized writer of the later novels. Burney's early and anonymous writings are powerful, says Simons, because they "assert . . . the centrality of the self in defining the nature of experience" and "embody the triumph of contingency over form" (40). Yet once Burney became aware of her audience, her fiction became more formally prescribed 254Rocky Mountain Review until by her third novel, Camilla, "In attempting to cater to the demands of a mass audience, she tried to conceal her own anxieties about conformism and this lack ofconfidence had a stultifying effect" (81). The book's inconsistency arises from Simons' efforts to establish that Burney felt "anxieties about conformism." As Simons makes clear in an informative first chapter on the novelist's life, Burney seldom asserted herself, either with her father, Dr. Charles Burney, or her mentor, the family friend "Daddy" Crisp, both of whom dissuaded her on grounds of propriety from comic drama, for which she may have had considerable talent; nor was she a full participant in conversations with Mrs. Thrale, Samuel Johnson, and their circle, although her diary reveals she felt at home there as a silent companion. Furthermore, she condemned Mrs. Thrale for her scandalous marriage to the musician Piozzi and declined acquaintance with Madame de Staël because of her questionable reputation. Thus at one moment Simons can write, "Burney's novels all assert the power of the conventions and the presentation of her heroines demonstrates her concern with the adaptation of the individual to the group, rather than the search for any escape...