Reviews for Frances Burney: The Life in the Works

The average rating for Frances Burney: The Life in the Works based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-15 00:00:00 Joey Wade Margaret Anne Doody's Frances Burney: The Life in the Works is a remarkable work of scholarly freethinking. Published in an era when the arcane codes of structuralism were viewed as the apogee of literary-critical discourse, it is free of cant and philosophizing alike. Much critical writing of the 1980s used a vocabulary that made it inaccessible to all but initiates, as if scholars were so insecure that they felt obliged to write only to impress their peers; by contrast, this book courageously offers universal readability. It might also have fallen into another broad stream of critical thinking, excessive psychologizing about its subject. While it takes a deepish dive into Burney's psyche, it avoids the traps of over-speculation and over-theorizing, rooting its views firmly in fact. The result is a classic study that offers enduring insight into its subject. Burney is often regarded as a beta version of Jane Austen'promising innovation but filled with bugs yet to be worked out. This is a true enough reading of her first and most widely read novel, Evelina, published in her early twenties. In that book she is a wit but an insecure one, telling good jokes but then feeling compelled to explain them. She challenges the absurdities of society but ultimately keeps her heroine politely within its bounds. Her second novel, Cecilia, is considered by cognoscenti to be her best, and the last two, Camilla and The Wanderer, are generally condemned by scholars for a flabby, excessively flowery style and bizarre plotting. Doody blasts these truisms out of the water. She focuses not on the mode of expression but on the substantive themes behind the persecuted heroines, feeble heroes, and relentless villains of the plots'and by doing so lays bare a whole different Burney. Doody's analysis has a feminist bent but I did not find it doctrinaire or a stretch beyond what the texts can support. She convincingly reveals Burney as a woman waging an increasingly explicit guerrilla warfare against her society, one who expressed through the codes of her stories a deep skepticism about, even hostility toward, the norms of male privilege and control. This is the first study of Burney's life and work to portray an author who matches the person I have encountered in reading her novels and diaries (so perhaps gratification at having my own views validated colors my sense of this study's merit'but I think not). Burney fascinates me as a woman who largely respected in her real-life actions the constraints of her culture while blasting them to smithereens in her imagined life. The paradoxes (and unresolved tensions) of her life intrigue and baffle me. Margaret Anne Doody in this book articulated those contradictions with an unmatched eloquence, backed by convincing detail. I found something to enrich and enlighten on every page.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-05-29 00:00:00 Ronnie Toth Taos sounds like it was an interesting place in the 20s and 30s. Lawrence was a bad tempered bully, I don't know why the author was so smitten.