Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. by Margaret Anne DoodyReview by: Patricia Meyer SpacksNineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Dec., 1989), pp. 405-407Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045162 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 12:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNineteenth-Century Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.119 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:24:23 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 405

statement that "Song of Myself" does not so much seek to establish a scale of value or that Whitman shifts attention away from the content of his meaning per se, as if to imply that any attempt to extrapolate its significance "must appear inconsequential in light of the poem's ab- sorptive energy." Larson's hesitation-indeed, the necessary circularity of his rhetoric-appears to underscore his thesis about interpretation.

JEROME LOVING

Texas A&M University

MARGARET ANNE DOODY, FrancesBurney: The Life in the Works. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Pp. xx+ 441. $40 cloth; $14.95 paper.

As Margaret Anne Doody constructs her, Frances Burney manifests more Romantic energy than Augustan sta- bility. The prudish, compliant, faintly trivial diarist and novelist mar- ginalized by orthodox literary histories vanishes in Doody's account, replaced by an ambitious, even "heroic" (Doody's word for her) figure whose writing located important social issues and implied a revolu- tionary consciousness, whose life demonstrated her will to achieve what she called "self-dependence"-a goal reached more successfully in her fictions than in her experience. Keeping Burney's literary production (including her eight virtually unknown plays, several unpublished) al- ways in the foreground, Doody forcefully argues the writer's impor- tance. More fully than any of her critical predecessors, she makes the case for Burney as protofeminist, while placing her subject in a dense literary, familial, and social context. Polemically powerful, always au- thoritative, this biography makes absorbing reading.

For that matter, even the bare facts of Burney's life hold consid- erable interest. Daughter of a socially striving musicologist, Frances at the age of ten lost her mother. Subsequently she found herself sub- jected to a stepmother whom she and her four siblings considered hate- ful. On her fifteenth birthday, shortly before the stepmother's advent, the girl made a bonfire of her previous imaginative writing, including a complete novel, thus attempting to conquer, she wrote long after- wards, "an inclination at which I blushed, and that I had always kept secret." Eleven years later she published Evelina and became famous. Exhorted by her "Daddy" Crisp to make money while she could, Burney obediently wrote a stage comedy-only to have both her real and her

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.119 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:24:23 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

406 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

metaphorical father urge her, apparently from considerations of fem- inine propriety, not to make it public.

Obediently, she returned to writing novels. Cecilia earned ?250 and enthusiastic reviews. More than ever a celebrity, Burney, now in her early thirties, fell in love with an impecunious clergyman who paid her many attentions but failed to declare himself. Then she was summoned (sentenced might seem a more appropriate verb) to Court. Her misery as deputy keeper of the robes to Queen Charlotte, a fate enjoined by her father, lasted ten years; during this time she composed three trag- edies. Finally released because of the conspicuous ill health that dra- matized her unhappiness, at forty-one Burney married, against her fa- ther's wishes, a French emigre, bore a son, paid for the family home by writing Camilla, and lived for ten years in France. She endured, with- out anesthetic or female companionship, a radical mastectomy. She sur- vived her husband and her son, dying at the age of eighty-eight. Her last and most daring novel, The Wanderer, appeared in 1814, to ferocious reviews; her final work was a memoir of her father.

Doody reads Burney's writing partly as psychological allegory of its creator's personal experience, in which covert resistance to her fa- ther played a large part. The novelist's career began with a book in- troduced by a poem to her father, addressed as "Author of my being." That career concluded, Doody observes, with Burney's assuming verbal control of her father's life, "becoming Author of the Author of her being." Between these end points she produced many imaginative ex- plorations of men's and women's power. With increasing emphasis and consistency, Burney evokes weak, ineffective, passive men, in contrast to women forced by hard circumstance to acquire and demonstrate strength. More and more clearly, she focuses attention on social ob- stacles to the longed-for state of female "self-dependence," her fictional canvas enlarging finally to include (in The Wanderer) two countries, sev- eral levels of society, a broad range of personality and of employment. She considers the plight of heiresses and of milliners, illuminating their common subjection to male domination. And finally she demonstrates unequivocally that women need not, must not, finally cannot, depend on their daddies. The Wanderer, rich in its presentation of existential threat, dramatizes the loneliness, the inevitable pain, of every individ- ual self.

To support this interpretation of Burney's oeuvre, Doody provides detailed, insistent readings of each individual work, including skillful plot summaries for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the texts. (Not only have several plays never appeared in print, The Wanderer has not been republished in the twentieth century, although an edition with

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.119 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:24:23 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 407

Doody as coeditor is forthcoming.) She offers deft commentary on con- temporary responses to Burney that dramatize the pressures on a woman to be unthreateningly "feminine"; she makes vivid the obstacles this eighteenth-century woman encountered. Understanding her sub- ject as heroic, she marshals evidence for heroism in action. Her read- ings of Burney's texts-venturing into applications of Lacanian and French feminist theory, often psychoanalytic in general mode-and of Burney as text demonstrate passionate consistency of purpose.

Doody's Frances Burney does not altogether correspond to mine- a more ambiguous, divided figure in life, as that life emerges in reports by herself and others, and in her fictions. The constitution of a bio- graphical subject, like that of the self as subject, involves selection and rejection of evidence, the making of an order inevitably false to the ungraspable totality of experience. The biographer plays God: a fact apparent here when Doody pronounces, claiming a knowledge no hu- man being ever has of another, that Burney's "treachery" to Hester Thrale "was the worst act of Frances Burney's life." (She repeats es- sentially the same point at her book's end, with a saving qualification: "As far as I know.") We need biography, as we need fiction, for its im- plicit insistence on life's comprehensibility. One might find Doody's interpretations on occasion irritatingly tendentious or excessively se- lective. The Charles Burney who figures here as narcissistic obstructer of his daughter's happiness appears in Kristina Straub's study of Bur- ney (Divided Fictions, Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1987) as an "indulgent," "vital and attractive" father. But the strength of Doody's work derives from its powerfully single view. The biographer assumes full respon- sibility for her forceful and determined acts of interpretation, her de- fense of Burney as woman and as verbal creator. She claims, finally, that Frances Burney's writing deserves to be read. Her book makes the point incontrovertible.

PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS University of Virginia

GAYE TUCHMAN, with NINA E. FORTIN, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Pp. xx + 266. $30.

In Britain in the early nineteenth century little prestige attached to the writing of novels, and most novelists were

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.119 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:24:23 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions