“The darts to wound with endless love!” On Hannah Cowley’s response to Frances Burney’s "Evelina"

The paper traces the intertextual echoes of Frances Burney’s debut novel, "Evelina", in "The Belle’s Stratagem", a play by Burney’s contemporary Hannah Cowley. The latter was certainly an avid admirer of Burney. In one of her poems she pays tribute to the novelist and praises her ability to achieve uncommon subtlety in the depiction of characters in her writing: “What pen but Burney’s …/… draws from nature with a skill so true” (Escott 2012: 38). The paper, however, argues that the connection between the writers and their literary productions goes much further than the obeisance paid to Burney in Cowley’s admiring verses. The congruence between the plots of "Evelina" and "The Belle’s Stratagem", and, in some instances, the very wording used in the two texts, poses immediate questions about its significance in Cowley’s popular play (which was first produced in 1780, two years after the publication of Burney’s debut). The conclusions suggest that Cowley deliberately drew Burney’s novel into a discussion on viable models of femininity and matrimony in contemporary society. But they also point to a wider phenomenon, namely, the extent to which the relationship between the eighteenth-century theatre and novel was reciprocal. While several recent studies discuss the influence of the theatre on the novel, little has been said on the importance of the novel for the development of the contemporary drama. This new reading of Cowley’s "The Belle’s Stratagem" as a response to Burney’s "Evelina" shows the immediacy with which a literary dialogue could be opened by authors and appreciated by audiences on the vibrant eighteenth-century cultural scene

Textual intercourses of women playwrights with their audiences at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

"I … feel encompassed with chains when I write, which check me in my happiest flights, and force me continually to reflect, not, whether this is just? but, whether this is safe?” (vii), confessed Hannah Cowley in the preface to her 1786 comedy, A School for Greybeards. The chains of literary propriety, she explained further, constrained the free movement of a woman playwright’s creativity far more narrowly than it was experienced by male playwrights or novelists of either sex. Despite these difficulties, Cowley was one of the most successful dramatists of the end of the 18th century, and yet, when she drew the curtains on the stage in 1795 with her last play The Town Before You, it was again on a very bitter note. The audience, she complained preferred the slapstick “tumble from a chair” (xi), to “genius or intellect” (x) of a carefully crafted dialogue. “From a Stage, in such a state, it is time to withdraw” (x), she concluded in the preface to The Town. At the same time, by the very act of presenting these arguments to the readers of her plays, Cowley seems to suggest that they, in contrast to mere playgoers, constituted a more discerning audience: that they could be confided in and relied on to judge the play’s true merit. The play on page, then, rather than on stage, was to do justice to the playwright’s talent. When Cowley was quitting the dramatic arena with her last comedy, another woman writer, Joanna Baillie, was preparing to enter it, also with an extended prefatory discourse aimed at the reading public. Interestingly, while Cowley only published her plays after they had been performed, Baillie, by publishing The Plays on Passions in 1798 reversed the order of the first encounter between the audience, author, and plays. Textual intercourse in their case, she must have judged, would do better to precede the embodiment of actual performance. The paper explores the complex reasons for and effects of these and other diverse strategies women playwrights employed to reach their ends of public recognition and commercial success at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and views each as a means of negotiating the position of the playwright and her works within the malleable body of literary hierarchy. Thus, the paper aims to shed light on the brewing climate in which later Romantic writers engaged with the drama on both page and stage

Frances Burney and her readers : the negotiated image

In Frances Burney and Her Readers, Anna Paluchowska-Messing traces the rugged trajectory marked by the literary career of Frances Burney, the English eighteenth-century novelist, diarist and playwright. The study highlights the techniques Burney employed in her texts for projecting a favourable self-image, and sets them against the changing conventions in culture consumption and appreciation. More broadly, the study addresses the concept of women’s literary celebrity, which in late eighteenth-century England remained at odds with contemporary ideals of feminine respectability and prescribed domesticicity. In Paluchowska-Messing’s representation, Burney’s story showcases the dilemmas an eighteenth-century author must face at different stages of her career from debutante to that of an acclaimed literary figure, and possible solutions she might choose in order to court celebrity without losing respectability

Frances Burney (re)reads "The winter's tale" : women's ‘nature’ and sociability in "Evelina" and "The woman-hater"

The article examines two works by Frances Burney: her debut novel "Evelina" (1778) and one of her later plays "The Woman-Hater" (1800–1802) as appropriations of and returns to the tropes present in William Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale" (1623). The investigations explore Burney's particular interest in the roles allotted to women within familial sociability at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while the adaptive strategies employed by her are scrutinised to highlight their potential of questioning the existing social paradigms and power structures. The conclusions show that the literary dialogue into which Burney entered with earlier authors both reflected and prompted social change occurring at the time of the production of the novel and the play

Frances Burney - a short history of a writer who was late for Romanticism

Artykuł przedstawia postać Frances Burney, bestsellerowej powieściopisarki angielskiej, która pod koniec XVIII wieku nie tylko wyniosła powieść do rangi szanowanego gatunku literackiego, ale także jako pierwsza kobieta cieszyła się zarówno wielką sławą powieściopisarską jak i nieposzlakowaną reputacją. Artykuł skupia się na negocjacjach Burney z czytelnikami, widocznymi zarówno w jej tekstach literackich jak i towarzyszącym im paratekstach, które miały na celu wypracowanie takiego właśnie pożądanego przez autorkę wizerunku publicznego. Artykuł zwraca szczególną uwagę na ostatnią powieść Burney, The Wanderer (1814), jako przykład ostatnich i nieudanych interakcji pisarki z czytelnikami. The Wanderer jawi się tu jako tekst spóźniony o dwie dekady w swych propozycjach społeczno-politycznych, rodem z czasów kiedy to, według Williama Wordswortha, "bliss was it […] to be alive."The paper presents a sketch of the life and literary career of Frances Burney, one of the first best-selling woman writers in the history of the British novel. The main focus is Burney’s negotiations of her own public image as conducted in her literary works. While the outcome of Burney’s endeavours in this quarter was at first very much to her advantage, in time the novelist’s reputation as a writer of merit seems to have faded. To explain the reasons for such a turn of events, the paper explores particularly the contrast between Burney’s debut, Evelina (1778), and her last published novel, The Wanderer; Or Female Difficulties (1814), scrutinising the narrative choices made in the two texts, the scope of the themes they examine, and the reception each met with on its publication. The conclusions of this analysis show that the engagement of The Wanderer in political and social debates made it a controversial text in the times following the havoc of the French Revolution. The British society of the early 19th century was not then disposed to open anew the discussions on the rights of man or woman, which had shaken Europe two decades previously. In this sense, Burney’s last novel came too late to be counted among the first Romantic texts. On the other hand, as the paper shows, new readings of the text today reveal the freshness of the multidimensional approach Burney presents to the dilemmas she sets for her characters in the novel. In this sense, while The Wanderer may have been published too late for Romanticism, it is certainly not too late to read and appreciate the novel today

Clockwork novel: the mechanics behind Frances Burney’s prose composition

The paper explores the didactic potential of the novels by the eighteenth-century English writer Frances Burney. To this end, it takes up the metaphor of a life-like automaton – a symbol of human ingenuity and artistic mastery, and a popular object of entertainment in the eighteenth century – and examines its applicability to describe the act of construing a novelistic text. The analysis yields the conclusion that Burney’s experiments with narrative techniques (third-person narration, free indirect discourse, heteroglossia) were employed to ensure the narrator’s authority through the strategic withdrawal of the authorial feminine voice, and were also instrumental in achieving a text which would be both aesthetically pleasing and instructive to the readers. Burney’s didacticism, moreover, proves to be very modern, that is not prescriptively moralizing, but rather training the readers in the exercise of empathy