Francis Burney
Created | Updated May 11, 2006
She was a novelist of stature in the eighteeth century. Her plays are also recognised as important works today, although her ability as a playwright was not neccesarily recognised by contemporaries. It was a talent which was suppressed by her family, partly because of her gift for saitre, which could have plunged her, and her family, into hot water as she satirised the very people they were dependant on for a living.. the critics known as the Bluestockings.
The eighteeth century, when I began to study it, sounded exceptionally dull. However, it is a lot more interesting than that. In her journals, Burney is even more lively than her fiction, she was the first to write about having a mastectomy - painful as it is now for a woman, it seems unimaginable then. She wrote about meeting the mad king, George III, which was by accident one day during hte years she spent attatched to the Court. He favoured her father, Dr. Burney, above all others connected with the music trade (Burney was a music historian, and Francis assisted him in her early years).
One of her most famous novels is 'Evelina' which focuses on a country girl's entrance into the world known as polite society. It is a riot of comedy, whilst using superior (for a first novel) literary techniques over the problem of identity and it also functioned as a guide book (like other conduct manuals) to young women making their debut!
Although hse is overlooked in terms of the canon, literary critics are fighting ot make her better known. Burney's work is worthy of this, for although in a different style, she is comparable to figures such as Jane Austen, who the world has recognised as one of it's great novelist from the start. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own dismissed Burney, but it has taken the gaze of new schools of thought to realise what Burney was doing in her work.
The eighteeth century, when I began to study it, sounded exceptionally dull. However, it is a lot more interesting than that. In her journals, Burney is even more lively than her fiction, she was the first to write about having a mastectomy - painful as it is now for a woman, it seems unimaginable then. She wrote about meeting the mad king, George III, which was by accident one day during hte years she spent attatched to the Court. He favoured her father, Dr. Burney, above all others connected with the music trade (Burney was a music historian, and Francis assisted him in her early years).
One of her most famous novels is 'Evelina' which focuses on a country girl's entrance into the world known as polite society. It is a riot of comedy, whilst using superior (for a first novel) literary techniques over the problem of identity and it also functioned as a guide book (like other conduct manuals) to young women making their debut!
Although hse is overlooked in terms of the canon, literary critics are fighting ot make her better known. Burney's work is worthy of this, for although in a different style, she is comparable to figures such as Jane Austen, who the world has recognised as one of it's great novelist from the start. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own dismissed Burney, but it has taken the gaze of new schools of thought to realise what Burney was doing in her work.
