«I often thought if it could not be dissolved, it could only with life be extirpated»: a translemic analysis and Spanish translation of Frances Burney’s Letter from Frances Burney to her sister Esther about her mastectomy without anaesthetic, 1812

Frances Burney (1752-1840) was one of the most influential eighteenth-century British novelists. Apart from the novel, Burney also cultivated the theatre and she wrote texts of a marked political nature on the French Revolution, a fact that is not so well– known by the general public. This article is inscribed within the framework of gender studies and the so-called Burney Studies and aims to analyze Letter from Frances Burney to Her Sister Esther About her Mastectomy Without Anaesthetic, 1812. By its subject, the document is an account of current interest for both medicine and feminism. Here Letter Here Letter is studied from the perspective of translation studies, specifically taking Itamar Even-Zohar’s theory of literary polisystems and various translation strategies as a methodological reference. We will examine the configuration of the key elements of Even-Zohar’s approach and various translation strategies as a methodological reference in this text which we will approach translation studies as a pathography, insisting on the identification between female subject and writing, Burney’s courage in confronting the disease and the particular relationship she establishes with the participants in the story and the impact that disease has on those around and helping her. Finally, the Spanish translation of Letter is offered, so Spanish-speaking readers have access to this document recently digitized by The British Library. Letter is a chronicle of pain, but also of courage and a real lesson in the intimate relationship between women and writing that was always so important to Burney. This study also means a re-vision of the writer that is far from what we could have until now.

The Letters in the Story

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

Gender, the novel and the modern order of time

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.

Growing Up Burney

The pressure of family identity and politics affected more than one generation of Burneys. Beyond Frances Burney, and her intense relationship with her father Charles Burney, were other family members who also felt the pressure to “write & read & be literary.” These tendencies can be seen most clearly in the works of juvenilia preserved in the family archive. A commonplace book bound in vellum has been discovered that preserves more than one hundred poems, mostly original compositions written by family and friends. The activity of commonplacing reflects a community in which reading and writing are valued. Collected by the youngest sister of Frances Burney, they seem to have been copied after she married. The juvenile writings of her nieces and nephews preponderate, whose talents were encouraged, as they give versified expression to their deepest feelings and fears. Literary influences of the Romantic poets can be traced, as the young authors define themselves in relation to these materials. Reflecting a kind of self-fashioning, the commonplace book helps these young writers explore their sense of family identity through literary form. This compilation represents a collective expression of authorship which can inform us about reading and writing practices of women and their families in the eighteenth century.