A review of Frances Burney’s Cecilia: A Publishing History, by Catherine M. Parisian, published by Ashgate in 2012, which demonstrates "how various literary guardians, from printers to publishers to critics, refashioned the novel’s character to accommodate new print forms, editorial strategies, and audience demographics" over the 200 years since it was first published

Kahan, Lee

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Lee Kahan

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ABO Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830

Frances Burney’s Cecilia: A Publishing History, by Catherine M. Parisian

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Book Review: Frances Burney’s Cecilia: A 
Publishing History, by Catherine M. Parisian 
 
Kahan, Lee 
 
 
To cite this article: Kahan, Lee. “Book Review: Frances Burney’s Cecilia: A 
Publishing History, by Catherine M. Parisian.” ABO: Interactive Journal for 
Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, vol. 3, no. 2, 2013, pp. 1752–840, 
doi:10.5038/2157-7129.3.2.4. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This document has been made available through IUScholarWorks repository, a 
service of the Indiana University Libraries. Copyrights on documents in 
IUScholarWorks are held by their respective rights holder(s). Contact 
iusw@indiana.edu for more information. 


 
Catherine M. Parisian, Frances Burney’s Cecilia: A Publishing History. Burlington, VT: 
Ashgate, 2012. xxi + 363 pp. $119.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-1820-7. 
 
Reviewed by Lee Kahan 
Indiana University South Bend 
 
In her first journal entry after the publication of Evelina, Frances Burney famously imagines the 
“power” that “anybody and everybody” has over her work now that it can be read “by every 
butcher and baker, cobbler and tinker, throughout the three kingdoms, for the small tribute of 
three pence” (D’Arblay 7). Her second novel, Cecilia, arguably dramatizes this concern, as her 
heroine attempts to maintain her character against the perpetual misreadings of her many 
guardians and male admirers. Parisian’s bibliographical study brings Burney’s fears to life by 
showing just how many hands Cecilia has passed through in its more than 200 year history and 
how various literary guardians, from printers to publishers to critics, refashioned the novel’s 
character to accommodate new print forms, editorial strategies, and audience demographics.  
 
Her study begins with a sympathetic account of Burney’s own struggles to preserve her artistic 
vision as she labors to meet hasty deadlines while defending the novel against Samuel Crisp’s 
suggestions for revision. Burney often adopts the pose of the dutiful daughter in her journal and 
letters, but Parisian reveals moments where she drops that façade to position herself as a 
confident “innovator in the genre,” who rejects Crisp’s advice on the grounds that it would make 
her ending mirror “the last Page of any Novel in Mr. Noble’s circulating library” (qtd. in Parisian 
9). By associating the circulating library with the superficial tastes of mass culture, Burney 
implies that Crisp, like many of her male characters, is a bad reader, whose tastes are governed 
by the fashions of the marketplace. Of course, this opposition between writing and the market 
obscures the degree to which Burney sought to capitalize on the fame of Evelina—a motive that 
becomes clear when she complains about printing delays and being “jockeyed” out of payment 
by her publishers, Payne and Cadell. Through a sensitive account of the complex and laborious 
task of printing and of the financial strain that it placed on its publishers, Parisian suggests that 
Burney’s complaints were largely unwarranted. Indeed, she shows that, in comparison with the 
practices of other publishers of the time, the remuneration Burney received was not only fair but 
generous.  
 
The following two chapters trace the “afterlife” of the novel as publishers and editors both at 
home and abroad reshaped the novel to reach new audiences. Nineteenth-century British editors 
adapted Cecilia to print vehicles like the novel series and the book-in-parts edition, both of 
which made the novel cheaper and therefore more attractive to a working class audience. 
However, because the novel was so long, it was usually abridged, with chapters sometimes 
added to summarize excised portions of the novel. Parisian also attends to how novel series in 
particular reframed the meaning of the work through introductions that emphasized “the theme 
of national identity,” even as those series included some translations of foreign novels (34). 
Burney’s novels were to play a different role in British national identity later in the century when 
they were repackaged as historical artifacts catering to the new emphasis on English classics in 
the educational curriculum. While early nineteenth-century publishers presented Burney’s novels 
as exemplars of the genre, they were now being framed as inferior writings that were nonetheless 
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Kahan: Frances Burney’s Cecilia: A Publishing History
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essential for cultural literacy. This reclassification as “classics” marketed to “the Upper-Middle-
Class of General Reader” changed the editorial process itself, which began to reflect principles 
of faithfulness and objectivity in keeping with the novel’s new stature as historical artifact (Ellis 
qtd. in Parisian 45).  
 
Parisian thus gives a rich sense of the numerous Cecilias available to the British reading public 
over the course of the nineteenth century. This diversity was compounded abroad due to the 
complexities of translation and the bilingualism of reading audiences. Parisian provides an 
interesting discussion of the “competing theories and practices of translation” in France (81), 
where the older method of altering the text to fit its new national context competed with a new 
approach rooted in scientific principles of “exactness and accuracy” (83). Readers had even more 
choices in countries like Germany, where the bilingualism of readers led to the simultaneous 
circulation of English, German and French editions. Hence, while Cecilia was a commercial 
success abroad, Parisian suggests that its audience was reading very different versions of the 
novel. 
 
While Parisian’s study offers numerous brief insights about how the novel’s packaging and 
editorial framework shaped the reading experience, literary critics like myself will undoubtedly 
wish that she had spent more time developing them, instead of focusing so much on numerical 
data. For example, she provides an exhaustive account of the number, cost and size of 
nineteenth-century abridged editions, but we learn little about the role of the excisions 
themselves, which critics like Leah Price have shown reflected and shaped changing assumptions 
about the value of novel reading. How the various editions of Cecilia encouraged particular 
readings of the novel perhaps comes through most clearly in the final chapter on the novel’s 
illustrations, in which Parisian finds a shift in emphasis from sensibility to plot and character. 
Parisian also sheds light on how these images reveal assumptions about the relationship between 
author and work, as several of the portraits of Cecilia bear a remarkable resemblance to Burney 
herself. However, the earlier chapters are more interested in the publishing and printing minutiae 
of the novel’s various editions than in the ideological or epistemological implications of editorial 
choices. While a testament to Parisian’s meticulous research, the lists of figures and dates 
sometimes become overwhelming and obscure the story that she is trying to tell. This is 
particularly the case in the first chapter, where her otherwise interesting account of the 
publishing process is interrupted by a detailed list of press figures and an exhaustive calculation 
of the number of sheets of paper necessary for the first print run. She often provides such 
information in table format as well, which seems to render unnecessary the repetition of this data 
in the account itself.  
 
Of course, such criticism is perhaps unfair since Parisian’s study is not a work of literary 
criticism but of bibliography. For the most part, the book delivers on her promise to “tell a story 
that incorporates not only the physical features of [Cecilia] but also the accounts of its 
composition, printing, publishing, reading, and circulation” (1). Of these five areas, “reading” 
certainly receives the least attention. While she occasionally provides the opinions of Cecilia’s 
reviewers, Parisian tends to focus on their superficial likes and dislikes, without delving into 
what those preferences suggest about reading practices or values. I was even more curious about 
why people stopped reading Cecilia for much of the nineteenth century, after it had received 
pride of place in many novel series only decades before. While Parisian attributes the novel’s 
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ABO:  Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, Vol. 3 [2013], Iss. 2, Art. 4
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol3/iss2/4
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.3.2.4
waning popularity to the increased number of works available to the public, one wonders if it 
also had something to do with how they responded to the content of the novel itself: perhaps 
Victorian culture was less comfortable than its predecessors with a woman writer who provides 
frank accounts of suicide, equates patriarchy with insanity, and refuses to allow readers to 
indulge in a fantasy of domestic bliss. 
 
To ask such questions, one must consider the readers’ interpretations of Cecilia as an integral 
part of its history, which also necessitates some attention to the content of the book itself. While 
critics like Janine Barchas have demonstrated the rich interpretive possibilities that we sacrifice 
by ignoring a literary work’s material form, we must likewise be careful of moving too far in the 
other direction and reducing the book to pure materiality—an object so many inches tall and 
including so many sheets of paper. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau suggests 
that “to read is to wander through an imposed system . . . analogous to the constructed order of a 
city” (169): authors, printers and publishers are its architects, tables of contents and chapter 
headings are its signage, sentences are its roads. Parisian provides a rich account of how this city 
is incessantly under construction: new roads are built and old ones closed, signs point readers in 
new directions. However, she does not account for the novel that readers themselves invent as 
they navigate its pages or the cultural forces at work in their daily lives that might inform such 
inventions. This, too, is the history of the book. While Parisian has given us the blueprints for 
how Cecilia was built, it remains for future critics to populate it. 
 
Works Cited 
 
D'Arblay, Frances Burney. Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay. Ed. Charlotte Frances 
Barrett. Vol. 1. London: Colburn, 1842. Print. 
 
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of 
California P, 1984. Print. 
 
 
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Kahan: Frances Burney’s Cecilia: A Publishing History
Published by Scholar Commons, 2013


Book Review: Frances Burney’s Cecilia: A Publishing History, by Catherine M. Parisian

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