“The Stormy Sea of Politics”: The French Revolution and Frances Burney's The Wanderer

Chapter Two examines how the evocation of sympathy in the historical novel generates both radical and reformist historical fictions. The interrogation of chivalric sentiment, which begins with Sophia Lee, accelerates after the French Revolution. Responding to Edmund Burke, radical writers like Charlotte Smith, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft argue for a redistribution of sympathy and for a new, more rational historiography. After the Terror, these notions of history for the ‘mass’ were themselves subject to reformulation, notably in the historical novel of the recent past. Historicising the French Revolution, Charles Dacres (1797), Lioncel; or Adventures of an Emigrant (1803), Edgeworth’s ‘Madame Fleury’ (1809) and Burney’s The Wanderer [1814] explore the possibility of an commercial exchange at once sympathetic and economic. Along with other historical novels including Ann Yearsley’s The Royal Captives [1795] and Montford Castle [1795]), such works implicitly suggest the need for workers to be safely politicised.

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“An Alien to my Country”: Migration and Statelessness in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer

Migration and Modernities ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440349.003.0006 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 125-149

Author(s):

Patricia Cove

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

Social Groups ◽

Napoleonic Wars ◽

National Belonging ◽

British Nationalism ◽

The Wanderer ◽

The French Revolution

Chapter five argues that Frances Burney’s final novel The Wanderer (1814) uses the familiar plight of the French émigré to critique insular British nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars. The novel’s protagonist Ellis seeks safety from the violence of the French revolution in her native England, where she attempts to re-make her identity by inhabiting a range of socioeconomic positions and geographical spaces that mediate her relationship to the broader British community. By figuring Ellis’s socially liminal position in geographic terms, Burney engages with a trend in literature of the 1790s that politically re-maps Britain in the revolutionary context. Her wanderings highlight the conflict between her allegiances to multiple social groups and her interior self, as her constant motion severs the connections by which she is bound to these communities and leaves her stripped of any sense of national belonging..

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“An Observance of Silence to the Events”

English Language Notes ◽

10.1215/00138282-7716147 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 57 (2) ◽

pp. 58-70

Author(s):

Shelby Johnson

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

Haitian Revolution ◽

The Novel ◽

Caribbean History ◽

Romantic Era ◽

The Haitian Revolution ◽

The Wanderer ◽

The French Revolution

Abstract Juliet Granville, the protagonist of Frances Burney’s novel The Wanderer (1814), enters the novel fleeing the French Revolution and disguised in blackface. This article argues that Juliet’s act of racial counterfeiting implicitly gestures toward the Haitian Revolution without naming that historical touchstone and emblematizes a theory of trace histories that Burney articulates in the novel’s dedication. There, she sketches an agonistic vision of history through what she calls “traces,” where events “though already historical, have left traces” that have been “handed down . . . from generation to generation” and tarry in the present. Burney frames the trace as an afterlife of an event that cannot be quite integrated into the broader scope of “history” as such but which leaves behind profound formal remainders. Burney’s dedication thus theorizes how to read Romantic-era novels for those fragments of form, and Juliet’s disguise replots erasures of Caribbean history as a problem of reading.

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Gender, the novel and the modern order of time

História da Historiografia ◽

10.15848/hh.v13i34.1633 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (34) ◽

pp. 173-199

Author(s):

Renata Dal Sasso Freitas

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Napoleonic Wars ◽

The Novel ◽

Frances Burney ◽

Men And Women ◽

The Wanderer ◽

The French Revolution ◽

The Revolution

This article aims to analyze the 1814 novel The Wanderer, or female difficulties by English writer Frances Burney and how its depiction of Britain at the time of the French Revolution can contribute to the understanding of the emergence of what François Hartog called the modern regime of historicity. Like many authors analyzed by Hartog in his books Regimes of Historicityand Croire en Histoire, Burney was personally affected by the French revolutionary process, a fact that is reflected in her last work. However, the time of its publication – when the Napoleonic Wars were at their end – made it outdated, something that was compounded by the debates regarding the Revolution and issues of gender that it was steeped in. By analyzing this novel, I will argue that issues of gender also played a role in the changes of how men and women related to time at this period as part of the transformations in the concept of History that occurred at the turn of the eighteenth century.

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