COPYRIGHTED BY HOWARD LEE GERMAN 195® FANNY BURNEY AMD THE LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University by HOWARD LEE GERMAN, B. S., H. A. The Ohio State University 1957 Approved by: • P t Adviser Department of English TABLE COP CONTENTS Pag« I INTRODUCTION........... * ................... 1 (1) Earlier Criticism of MissBurney's Hovels • 1 (2) The HovelBefore 1770 .................... 8 (3) The Novel Between 1770-1800 • ............ 26 II E V E L I N A ..................................... 57 III CECILIA ..................................... 128 IT CAMILLA ................................... 181 7 THE WANDERER.... ............................ 241 71 CONCLUSION................................... 287 BIBLIOGRAPHY- ..................................... 300 ii FANNY BURNEY AND THE LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL INTRODUCTION (1 ) Earlier Criticism of Miss Burney's Novels In The English Novel George Saintsbury writes: Frances Burney and her Evelina (1778)» not to mention her subsequent workB and her delightful Diary, have been the subject of a great deal of writing: but though more than a hundred years— more indeed than a century and a quarter — have passed since the book insidiously took London by gradual storm, it may, without too much presumption, be questioned whether either book or author has yet been finally or satisfactorily "placed."-^ Saintsbury continues by pointing out that the “actual critical evaluations of the novel-values of Miss Burney's four attempts in novel writing are very rare." Although very critical of Miss Burney last novel, Saintsbury himself "places" Miss Burney quite high and regards Evelina as "one of the points de repere of the English novel." "Without too much presumption," one might add that in the forty-odd years since Saintsbury wrote the statements quoted above, very little has been written that helps to determine the "novel- values" of Miss Burney's works. ^George Saintsbury, The English Novel (London, ?13)» P» 150 1 2 During the 179 years since her first work appeared, Miss Burney's position as a novelist has varied considerably. The high point of her popularity undoubtedly was reached shortly after the publication of Bvelina. which ran through four editions inside of two years and evoked the plaudits of such connoisseurs as Johnson, Sheridan, Gibbon, Burke and Eeynolds. later readers were less enthusiastic: the temper of nineteenth-century criticism-and most modern criticism also— is exemplified in this judgment by Hazlittj Madame d'Arblay is . a mere common observer of manners, and also a very woman. It is this last circumstance which forms the peculiarity of her writings • • • . She is a quick, lively, and accurate observer of persons and things; but she always looks at them with a consciousness of her sex, and in that point of view in which it is the particular business and interest of women to observe them. There is little in her work of passion or character, or even manners, in the most extended sense of the word, as implying the stun total of our habits and pursuits; her forte is in describing the absurdities and affectations of external behavior, or the manners of •people in company.^ Another nineteenth-century writer, Macaulay, is not quite so dis­ paraging; in countering a vicious criticism of Miss Burney by J. W. Croker, Macaulay, although ranking her below Jane Austen because of the latter's superiority in delineating individual character, describes her as a genius. He attributes the decline in her popularity to the fact that the public was unduly influenced by the inferiority of her last works (in particular her edition of 2 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1931). VI, 123. 3 The MemoIra of Dr. Burney): this inferiority itself he ascribes to the stultifying effect of the years Miss Burney spent as Mistresp of the Qpeen's Robes and to a pernicious Johnsonian influence upon her style. Anxious to re-establish her literary reputation he writes: It is not only on account of the intrinsic merit of Madame d'Arblay1s early works that she is entitled to honorable mention. Her appearance is an important epoch in our literary history. Evelina was the first tale written by a woman, and purporting to be a picture of life and manners, that lived or deserved to live*3 Most twentieth-century criticism follows the pattern suggested by these passages from Saintsbury, Hazlitt and Macaulay: inevitably criticism of her works is concerned with the merit of the novels (with the usual praise for the vividness of the character-types and the social setting), her contribution to the development of the novel, and the causes for the decline in her literary ability. 3t . Babington Macaulay, "Madame d'Arblay," Essays: Critical and Miscellaneous (New York, 1878), p. 593* ^The attitudes and concerns found in most of the twentieth- century criticism of Miss Burney's novels can be seen in the follow­ ing excerpts taken from the works of four critics. Will T. Hale states that the last two novels are too long, Cecelia is only a fair novel, but Evelina has a chance for immor­ tality because it is "vivavious" and "not too long"; "it has dramatic situations; and it has a fresh, rare charm. It marks the first fine work to be done by a woman in English fiction; specifi­ cally it presents the world as seen from a woman's point of view. Miss Burney's satire takes the novel of manners into domestic life." Hale says that she failed in her later works because "she out-Johnsoned Johnson; she outwept the school of Mackenzie, she sentimentalized beyond even the most sentimental moods of Richardson; and with an artificiality totally depraved, she crushed out the fresh, charming power of her hative genius." Madame d'Arblay's Place in the Development of the English Novel, Indiana University Studies No. 28 (Bloomington, 1916). Edith Morley speaks of 3P. Burney's novels "as an epitome of Jf Although Miss Burney Is treated with some deference in histories of the novel, she has not received much attention as a the life and thoughts, and above all of the feelings of young women in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Taken together, they form a brilliant achievement which contributed new elements to the novel as inaugurated by Bichardson, Fielding, Sterne and Smollett.” Mrs. Morley praises Miss Burney for her use of dialogue, for the introduction into literature of the feminine point of view, for the variety of scene, and the vividness of the character pre­ sentation. She adds that for Miss Burney “plot is always sub­ ordinate— though probably she would not admit it. What interests her, and therefore her readers, are people, chiefly in their social life and amid everyday surroundings. We get to know them as they appeared to their contemporaries, sometimes pretty intimately, more often rather superficially, and almost always from their speech, manners, and actions rather than from their thoughts and deeper motives." Fanny Burney. The English Association Pamphlet No. 60. After an excellent but brief analysis of the novels, B. G. MacCarthy concludes that F. Burney has written “one novel which, although it was superficial, was great. It was great because, in some respects, it excelled the technique of previous novels, and because it marks the point at which the feminine movement in fiction comes fully into view." The inferiority of her later novels is blamed upon a drying up of the youthful exuberance and excesses of energy which had produced Evelina. The Later Women Novelists (Oxford, 19^7), pp. 87-129. David Cecil praises F. Burney for her power of story telling and character drawing, her ability to trace the process of feelings, but he condemns her for her improbable plots. He describes her role in the history of English Letters by saying that “she was the first writer to translate the Fielding type of novel into the feminine key." She did not achieve a greater success because she was “hardly an artist at all in the fullest sense of the word. The novel to her was not the expression of an imaginative conception, but merely a means of recording her observations of the world, which she organ­ ized into an artificial unity by using any convention of story writing she found to her hand. Only if she had lived in an age that had presented her ready-made with a thoroughly sound model for a work could she have achieved consistently good work." According to Cecil, the later novels suffer from a Johnsonian infection so that "the moralism is more aggressive than ever, and the language more stilted." "Fanny Burney," Poets and Story-Tellers (New York, 19^9). PP. 77-96. novelist in the twentieth century; the Diaries with their intimate pictures of many of her famous contemporaries continue to attract readers and to inspire biographers-— she has been the subject of at least five biographies in the last twenty-five years* But of the novels, only Evelina can lay claim to any sort of continuing wide­ spread popularity.^ Undoubtedly this novel appeals to readers with historical interests who wish to acquire, in an enjoyable fashion, knowledge about the social background of the eighteenth century, and to readers who are anxious to enjoy, if only in literature, a stability of society that is lacking ifa our own age.^ But, at the same time, there is a growing awareness that the type of novel represented by Evelina has a worth which has been ignored by many modern critics and readers, who, preoccupied with psychology and the current aesthetic ideas, have ignored the social insights and the valuable descriptions of “reality" presented in the novel of manners* This newer awareness is illustrated in a recent analysis by Edwine Montague and Louis Martz in which Evelina is contrasted with All The King*8 Men.^ Although noting that the social and •5|Ehe Cumulative Book index lists three new editions of this novel in the last twenty-five years* Edwine Montague and Louis L.