Evelina Bibliography

The bibliography in the "World's Classics" edition of Evelina is brief and now out of date. The most important entry on it is Joyce Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney (1958). All of Burney's novels have been published in the "Oxford English Novels." Kristina Staub has edited Evelina for Bedford Cultural Editions (1997). The edition of her journals and letters by Hemlow and others is also important. A good selection from the journals and letters has been edited by Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide for Penguin (2001).  Useful websites include the following:

http://is.dal.ca/~bdarby/burney.html

http://www.c18.rutgers.edu/biblio/burney.html

 

Bloom, Harold, ed. Fanny Burney's Evelina. New York: Chelsea, 1988. [Like all of the Bloom collections, this one suffers from the omission of notes for the articles it collects. Includes previously published articles by Ronald Paulson (on Evelina as Cinderella), Susan Staves (on Evelina's anxieties), Patricia Spacks (on Burney as revealed in her diaries), Judith Lawlor Newton (on masculine control through marriage and economics), and Mary Poovey (on paternalism in Evelina), and newly published essays by Jennifer Wagner (on privacy, anonymity, and female identity), and Julia Epstein (on Evelina's deceptive self-presentation upon entering the social world).


Burney, Frances. The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. Edited by Lars E. Troide. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. {Includes journals of the 1770s.]

Burney, Frances. Selected Letters and Journals. Edited by Joyce Hemlow. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. [Includes selections from the twelve-volume edition of the journals.]

Campbell, Gina. "How to Read Like a Gentleman: Burney's Instructions to her Critics in Evelina." ELH 57,3 (Fall 1990): 557-83. [Evelina includes a model of reading (in which Lord Orville becomes the ideal critic) that emphasizes the parallel between Evelina's introduction to society and Evelina's reception. The male characters interpreting the character of Evelina mirror readings and misreadings of the novel.]

Chishom, Kate. Fanny Burney: Her Life, 1752-1840. [A competent and thorough biography, not interesting in its criticism of Burney's works. Shorter and less thoughtful than the biography by Harman.]

Choi, Samuel. "Signing Evelina: Female Self-Inscription in the Discourse of Letters." Studies in the Novel 31.3 (Fall 1999): 259-78. [The signatures to Evelina's letters exemplify not only her own problems of self-identification in relation to paternity but Burney's identification of Evelina in relation to earlier novels by men.]

Cutting-Gray, Joanne. Woman as 'Nobody" and the Novels of Fanny Burney. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. [Argues that "Burney does not treat herself as the woman constructed by patriarchy; instead she lets Nobody function as the alterity, the unnamed feminine that determines the structure of identity for the male." The heroine and epistler of Evelina "conceals her sexual and verbal power from others" but writes wittily observant letters.]

Devlin, D.D. The Novels and Journals of Fanny Burney. London: Macmillan, 1987. [A relatively short study with less emphasis on the novels than the journals, which are placed in a historical context. The brief treatment of Evelina notes its similarities to the journals and finds it valuable for its verve and energy rather than for theme, structure, or satire.]

Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. [Looks at Burney's novels (and plays) in the context of her life. Sees Burney as "a student of aggression and obsession," and sees Evelina both as a serious novel about the establishment of woman's identity and as an effective social farce, with the two themes connected by "the tensions involved in playing the female role."]

Dowling, William C. "Evelina and the Genealogy of Literary Shame." Eighteenth-Century Life 16.3 (November 1992): 208-20. [Shame is the realization by members of a small community that they have an unavoidable but unpleasant relationship to people outside that community. The depiction of shame in Evelina was Burney's major bequest to Jane Austin (especially in Pride and Prejudice).]

Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3.4 (July 1991). [A special issue on Evelina containing a prefatory essay by Julia Epstein, a concluding one by Margaret Doody, and four readings of the novel.]

Epstein, Julia. The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing. Bedminster: Bristol Classical Press, 1989. [The publication of Evelina exemplifies "the struggle [of women in general and Burney in particular] to synthesize propriety with public achievement." Includes chapters on the journals, the novels, and the reception of Burney. "Evelina is the story of how an individual denied her rightful access to power, money, title, family, and name manages to get all these things in the end without openly breaking any of the rules of decorum." Argues, eccentrically, that Burney's later novels are better than Evelina.]

Grau, Joseph A. Fanny Burney: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1981. [Includes descriptions of editions, translations, and reviews of Burney's work, as well as of scholarship to about 1980.]

Harman, Clare. Fanny Burney: A Biography. London: Harper Collins, 2000. [Full and detailed biography of Burney-frank about her deficiencies as well as her accomplishments., with a particular focus on her ambivalence about writing. Relies heavily, like other biographies, on Burney's journals, but reads them skeptically.]

Kowalski-Wallace, Beth. "A Night at the Opera: The Body, Class and Art in Evelina and Frances Burney's Early Diaries." In History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. 141-58. [A complex analysis of the opera scene in comparison to Burney's treatment of the opera in her Diaries, showing that Evelina's phobia of social disgrace derives from class, ideology, and the Branghton's failure to observe aesthetic conventions. Evelina's consequent fear for the construction of her identity is that of the author as well.]

McMaster, Juliet. "The Silent Angel: Impediments to Female Expression in Frances Burney's Novels." Studies in the Novel 21.3 (Fall 1989): 235-52. {Argues that a central focus of Burney's novels is the silence imposed on women by masculine society, especially in its prohibition against women expressing their love.]

Rogers, Katharine M. Frances Burney: The World of 'Female Difficulties.' New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. [Chapters on each of the novels. Sees Burney as a combination of subjectivity and social conformity. Celebrates Evelina's strong social satire from a feminist point of view, although the novel is weakened by "inappropriate pathos as well as inappropriate force."]

Schaffer, Julie. "Not Subordinate: Empowering Women in the Marriage-Plot--the Novels of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen." Criticism 34, 1 (Winter 1992): 51-73. [Sets up fictional images of woman--as subordinate to the lover-mentor (e.g., The Female Quixote) and as the perfect angel (Pamela). Evelina combines these figures in that the outwardly subordinate woman proves to be morally independent. In Pride and Prejudice each lover acts as mentor to the other.]

Simons, Judy. Fanny Burney. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987. [An introduction to Burney's life and work. The chapter on Evelina sees the heroine as a paradoxical figure-"pallid courtesy book figure" on the outside, but a shrewd analyst in her letters-and finds an uncomfortable conflict between humorous decorum and raucous physical satire.]

Straub, Kristina. Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. [The contradictions of Evelina, explored in three chapters, reveal the problems of the society they represent, and the representation of these problems is extended in Burney's later novels.]

Thaddeus, Janice Farrar. Frances Burney: A Literary Life. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 2000. [Centered on Burney's major works and her life as an author; less a full-scaled biography than an account of how Burney wrote her novels and how the events of her life are channeled into them. The image of Burney that emerges is complex and sophisticated.]

Zomchick, John. "Satire and the Bourgeois Subject in Frances Burney's Evelina." In Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, ed. James E. Gill. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. 347-66. [Evelina is a novel in which romance can only establish itself once the destructive work of satire has been accomplished. Written in critspeak.]

Zonitch, Barbara. Familiar Violence: Gender and Social Upheaval in the Novels of Frances Burney. Newark" University of Delaware Press, 1997. [Burney shares Evelina's belief in a system of patriarchal order and protection, but her representation of them shows their inherent flaws. Evelina's search for the absent father reveals the role of aristocratic patriarchy, whose breakdown leads to male violence. The bourgeois family inflicts psychological violence, and Evelina's female protectors are themselves implicated in patriarchy. Resolution comes as Evelina masters the arts of protection and as Orville emerges as a feminized protector.]

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