Frances Burney: The World of Female Difficulties

Katharine Rogers argues that of all the achieving women of the 18th century whose work has been recovered from obscurity, Frances Burney was the most inhibited by traditional concepts of femininity. Yet her life, her journals, and her novels sometimes point to a strength and creative vitality that existed side by side with timidity and stultifying conventionality. Professor Rogers confronts more traditional views of Burney, which emphasize her conservatism, while engaging with recent feminist criticism, which emphasizes Burney’s courage and shows her novels to be serious representations of the difficulties of women’s lives. Contents: Introduction; Evelina: or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World; Cecilia: A More Probing Look Into That World; Camilla: Family Relationships Complicating Entrance into the World; Protest Against the World’s Law; The Wanderer: A Political Analysis of the World; Conclusion: Tensions Between Form and Content; Notes; Works Cited.