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Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney’s Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney’s four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney’s eluding the major modern-isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its gendering of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist critique (here the details of Burney’s housekeeping become important); Professionalism (as a response to status inconsistency and class conflict); and Ian Watt’s Formal Realism (Burney perhaps saved the novel from a sharp decline it suffered in the 1770s, even as she tried to distance herself from the genre).
Burney’s most successful writing appeared before the coining of ideology . But her standing prior to ideology is not a matter of chronological accident. Rather, she quietly but forcefully resisted shared explanations-domesticity as model for household management, debt as basis for family finance, professional status as a means to social confidence, the novel as the dominant literary genre-that became popular during her long and eventful life.
Frederic Jameson has described Paul de Man, in private conversation, claiming, Marxism … has no way of understanding the eighteenth century. Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology conjoins Burney’s eighteenth-centuryness with her modernity.
