Cambridge University Press
9780521850346 - The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney - Edited by Peter Sabor
Frontmatter/Prelims

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
FRANCES BURNEY

Frances Burney (1752–1840) was the most successful female novelist of the eighteenth century. Her first novel Evelina was a publishing sensation; her follow-up novels Cecilia and Camilla were regarded as among the best fiction of the time and were much admired by Jane Austen. Burney’s life was equally remarkable: a protégée of Samuel Johnson, lady-in-waiting at the Court of George III, later wife of an emigré aristocrat and stranded in France during the Napoleonic Wars, she lived on into the reign of Queen Victoria. Her journals and letters are now widely read as a rich source of information about the Court, social conditions and cultural changes over her long lifetime. This Companion is the first volume to cover all her works, including her novels, plays, journals and letters, in a comprehensive and accessible way. It also includes critical discussion of her reputation, and a guide to further reading.

PETER SABOR is Director of the Burney Centre and Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth-Century Studies at McGill University. He is one of the General Editors of the Cambridge edition of the works of Samuel Richardson and the editor of Jane Austen’s Juvenilia in the Cambridge edition of Austen. With Thomas Keymer, he is the co-author of ‘Pamela’ in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2005).

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
FRANCES BURNEY

EDITED BY
PETER SABOR
McGill University

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First published 2007

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney for making this volume possible. For their valuable help with the editing, I am grateful to three assistants at McGill University’s Burney Centre: Laura Kopp, Alexis McQuigge and (visiting from Harvard) Hilary Havens. Linda Bree at Cambridge University Press has made many astute suggestions. I am indebted in various ways to Kate Chisholm, Stewart Cooke, Hester Davenport, Thomas Keymer and Paul Yachnin. For financial support, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs programme. My largest debt, as ever, is to Marie, my own companion.

CONTRIBUTORS

KATE CHISHOLM read history at Edinburgh University before training as a copy-editor at Cambridge University Press. She is the author of Fanny Burney; Her Life (1998) and Hungry Hell (2002). She is currently working on a book about the women in Dr Johnson’s circle, ‘Dr Johnson’s Female Army’, and has contributed an essay, ‘Best Bakery in Town’, to The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad (2006).

LORNA CLARK is Research Adjunct Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Editor of The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney (1997), she has contributed to the New Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Editor of the Burney Letter since 1999, she is currently working on two volumes of The Court Journals of Frances Burney.

MARGARET ANNE DOODY is currently Director of the PhD Program in Literature at the University of Notre Dame, where she is the John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature. She is the author of a biography Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. She has published several works of fiction, including her latest novel Mysteries of Eleusis (2005). Her forthcoming non-fiction book is Tropic of Venice.

VIVIEN JONES is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Gender and Culture in the School of English, University of Leeds. She has published widely on gender and writing in the period, including, as editor, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (1990), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (2000), Jane Austen’s Selected Letters (2004), and the Oxford World’s Classics Evelina (2002).

GEORGE JUSTICE is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England and the co-editor of Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England 1550–1800. Justice co-edits The Eighteenth-Century Novel: A Scholarly Annual.

BETTY RIZZO is Emerita Professor of The City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the editor of Volume IV of Burney’s Early Journals and Letters and author of Companions without Vows: Relationships among Eighteenth-Century British Women and many other books and essays.

PETER SABOR is Director of the Burney Centre and Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth-Century Studies at McGill University, Montreal. He has edited Burney’s Complete Plays and co-edited Cecilia and The Wanderer, as well as a selection of her Journals and Letters. He is general editor of The Court Journals of Frances Burney, in progress.

SARA SALIH is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She has edited The History of Mary Prince and The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole. She is currently working on a book on ‘brown’ women in Jamaica and England from the Abolition era to the present day.

JANE SPENCER is Professor of English at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on the eighteenth-century novel and on women’s literary history from the Restoration to the nineteenth century. Her latest book is Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon, 1660–1830 (2005). She is currently working on animals in eighteenth-century writing.

TARA GHOSHAL WALLACE is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at The George Washington University, Washington D.C. Her publications include Jane Austen and Narrative Authority, an edition of Burney’s A Busy Day, and, as co-editor, Women Critics, 1660–1820. She has published articles on Smollett, Johnson, Austen and Scott, and is currently writing Imperial Characters.

JOHN WILTSHIRE is Professor of English at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is the author, among other books, of Samuel Johnson in the Medical World, Jane Austen and the Body, Recreating Jane Austen and editor of Mansfield Park in the Cambridge edition of Austen’s Works.

CHRONOLOGY

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