Memorializing Sorrow in Frances Burney’s “Consolatory Extracts”

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Hilary Havens
Keyword(s):  
Frances Burney ◽  
Elizabeth Carter ◽  
The Wanderer

After her beloved sister Susan died on 6 January 1800, Frances Burney wrote several grieving letters, but her ordinarily voluminous journals and letters were markedly scant during the year 1800. Burney expressed her grief later and elsewhere, particularly in her little-known commonplace book, “Consolatory Extracts occasioned by the tragic death of her sister Susan Phillips in January 1800,” which reveals her protracted process of mourning through her appropriation of extracts from A Series of Letters Between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the year 1741 to 1770 (1809) and its composition following her mastectomy in 1811. Many of the themes in “Consolatory Extracts” suggest that Burney’s memorializing of Susan is similarly borne out in her fictional works, particularly her unfinished tragedy Elberta (1785–1814) and her novel The Wanderer (1814).

scholarly journals Frances Burney and Female Friendships : Some Notes on "Cecilia" (1783) y "The Wanderer" (1814)

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
María del Carmen Fernández Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Constraints ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Female Friendships ◽  
Literary Convention ◽  
The Wanderer

British eighteenth-century fiction is rich in presentations of female friendship, a literary convention which permeated all genres and the works of women writers with different ideological backgrounds, ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft’s radical views to Jane Austen’s conservative ones. This paper analyses the oeuvre of the well-known novelist, playwright and diarist Frances Burney (1752-1840) by taking into account Janet Todd’s ideas on female ties and the female spectrum in Burney’s productions. The English authoress took part in a feminist polemic. Here I maintain that the complexity of the relationships between women in Cecilia (1782) and The Wanderer (1814) is directly influenced by class and social constraints. On the other hand, there is an evolution towards a more benevolent view of woman which needs revision.

scholarly journals Gender, the novel and the modern order of time

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.

The imagery of The Wanderer

Neophilologus ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. L. Clark ◽  
Julian N. Wasserman
Keyword(s):  
The Wanderer

Burney's The Wanderer and Early-Nineteenth-Century Commodity Fetishism

2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Wanderer

This essay explores a particular moment in the history of commodity fetishism by means of an examination of Frances Burney's The Wanderer (1814). The novel, which is explicitly concerned with the social changes facing early-nineteenth-century England, reveals that at this historical moment the commodity inspired emotions of a particular kind: it was idealized and perceived as attractively individualized, aloof, exotic, and changeable, and it elicited a passionate and sometimes even painful form of desire. In The Wanderer Burney explores the human repercussions of this new way of engaging with objects in the marketplace. She reveals, moreover, the extent to which the fetishism of the commodity reflected not just developments within the economy but also political change: under the influence of the French Revolution the charisma once generated by social status was transferred to the economic realm, where, embodied in the commodity, it gave rise to a pleasurable but masochistic reverence. Burney'sargument for the usefulness of economic independence necessarily leads her to appreciate the commodity fetishism she describes: even while she develops a labor theory of value, Burney promotes a mystification of the commodity by insisting on the aloof independence of both labor and its products. Thus, Burney uses the apparent autonomy of things——which Marx decries——as a means to argue for the autonomy of the makers of those things.

70. Auden’s the Wanderer

1970 ◽  
Vol 28 (8) ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Duncan Robertson
Keyword(s):  
The Wanderer

At World's Edge: Post/Coloniality, Charles Maturin, and the Gothic Wanderer

2011 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Doyle
Keyword(s):  
The Caribbean ◽  
Political Investments ◽  
The Wanderer

Laura Doyle, “At World's Edge: Post/Coloniality, Charles Maturin, and the Gothic Wanderer” (pp. 513–547) The Gothic text has been shown to represent colonialism's crimes through its literary tropes of imprisonment, terror, rape, and tyranny. This essay takes a further step to propose that Gothic texts also register the historical resistance to colonialism's crimes. That is, they refer to anti-colonial insurgency—in Ireland, India, the Caribbean, and elsewhere—in the process evincing ambivalent anxieties about global, imperial instability. After reviewing the Gothic‘s entanglement with discourses of both liberation and barbarism, reflective of its contradictory political investments, the essay focuses on Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) to demonstrate the ways in which Gothic texts are structured against insurgency even as, in their “wandering,” haunted figures, they unveil a world in turmoil.

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