Burney: Writing Life and Fiction
This chapter traces the interfaces between Frances Burney’s use of embodied language in her novels and her life-writing in journals and diaries. It considers how Burney inhabits a world of letters through her familiarity with poetry and plays (performed in amateur theatricals) and how this surfaces, in particular in her use of free indirect discourse, both in her life-writing and in her novels. Burney’s practice` of writing and editing is investigated through an analysis of the different stages of composition in the manuscripts for her tragedies. Burney’s reflection of conduct book writing and the emergent form of the Bildungsroman are related to how her encounter with Madame de Genlis features in her life-writing and in Camilla. Across life-writing and fiction, Burney keeps renegotiating the embodied style developed throughout the eighteenth century.