Eighteenth-Century Fiction

From Propensity to Profession: Female Authorship and the Early Career of Frances Burney Betty A. Schellenberg In recent decades feminist literary critics have been intrigued by Frances Burney's early publishing career, beginning with the appearance of Evelina in January of 1778, when Burney first became the subject of public attention, through the writing and suppression of her first stage comedy, The Witlings, to the publication of Cecilia; or The Memoirs ofan Heiress inJuly of 1782. Supported by Burney 's letters andjournals, these readings have often focused on the eighteenth-century woman's experience of authorship. We are particularly indebted to Kristina Straub's analysis of the doubleness of Burney's early fictions, to MargaretAnne Doody's literary biography, and toJulia Epstein's identification of Burney's anger for an understanding of the tensions between late eighteenth-century prescriptions for the domestic woman's behaviour and a desire to comment publicly on contemporary society.1 Straub's and Doody's studies also emphasize social class as a consideration inseparable from that of gender in the formation of Burney's authorial identity; Catherine Gallagher's analysis ofpatterns ofnaming, namelessness, and debt in 1 Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1987); Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics ofWomen's Writing (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1989). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Numbers 3-4, April-July 2002 346EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Evelina and Cecilia has elaborated convincingly upon this account.2 These important studies nevertheless rely upon questionable parallels between the social and economic circumstances of Burney's young heroines of gentry status and education with the author's own experience as one "raised to the trade" of authorship, the relatively young, unmarried daughter of a family making a place for itself in an emerging literary-professional class.3 In other words, a common strategy of early feminist treatments has been to understand Burney 's career as typical of the proper woman writer. In the terms of this model, Burney's psychic and professional survival necessitated splitting off her identity as female writer from the models of female propriety which she endorsed in her writing.4 As work on women writers of the mid and later eighteenth century has begun to examine individual cases more closely, it has become clear that the explanatory value of this model has its limitations.5 Even for the early Burney and the literary circles of 1778 to 1782, it is no longer sufficiently nuanced. It is time we questioned our critical habit of collapsing Burney's notions of authorship with her portrayals of heroines such as Evelina and the two Cecilias of The Witlings 2 Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 203-56. Although Straub claims that a middle-class ideology of aspiration and self-improvement is as important as "an ideology of female powerlessness" in arriving at an understanding ofBurney 's "life expectations" (pp. 3-7), her model of these two imperatives as in irreconcilable conflict (viz. her title Divided Fictions) leads her to portray the former as inevitably overpowered by the latter. 1 propose rather to trace Burney's use of a print-culture model of professionalism to develop an authorial identity that freed her, to a significant extent, from the limitations of an essentialized feminine identity. 3 The phrase is Gallagher's, p. 216. As Gallagher goes on to note, "The writings ofother families might have been imagined as second-order realities, as accomplishments indicating a (past or present) economic independence, but the writings of the Burneys were the business of their lives" (p. 217). Doody reviews the importance for Charles Burney's social aspirations of his move from music teaching and performance to his invention, in effect, of musicology as a specialized field of study and publication (p. 12). Thus Frances had firsthand knowledge of the employment of professionalization, in its broad sociological sense, as a route to establishing a prestigious social identity. 4 That this...