It's that time of year again: that liminal moment of strangely enjoyable anticipation for anyone programmed by the educational system to feel that September (as well as, but in a different way to January) marks the start of a new year. If January is blankness, a roaring sea of white emptiness awaiting - what? (possibly the reason that New Year’s Eve and New Year's Eve parties do not necessarily offer unmixed pleasure); September - the second time around - offers a mellower, less exigeant range of possibility. September (probably) hasn't even been standing close to a bottle of champagne: it's the low-key, no-frills start to the year. September is definitely all about the new pencil case (and the good stationery).
So - what to read?
Well, September can be about taking one’s first steps into a new world (school, university, job). What better, then, than a young lady's entrance into the world (the rather splendid and expressive 18thc description for entering society as an adult)? Take a curtsey Evelina, subtitle as above (Fanny Burney).
Evelina has been brought up in rural retirement by her guardian, an unworldly parson, Mr Villars. There's some mystery about her birth but she's generally held to be the natural (illegitimate) daughter - another splendid, rather civilised 18thc phrase - of an aristocrat. To ensure her future (and we all know what that means), she's launched on London society; and she has to learn to negotiate her way through all the pitfalls a medley of parties, theatres, walks in the park - all the fashionable activities - offer a young, inexperienced lady. Especially men - often predatory, many boorish - prowling the ranks of society, ready to snap up (or ruin) an undefended young lady in an instant. Her travails are exacerbated because, for some reason, everyone thinks she's an heiress (she's not; Burney uses another novel to write about the perils confronting a young woman with a lot of money, handily subtitled The Heiress), which considerably ups the ante in terms of risk. (This was an age when, debating a protective matrimonial reform act in Parliament (roughly twenty years earlier), arguments opposing it could be made - straight-faced - because it would limit the opportunities for younger sons to establish themselves in the world: by abducting heiresses. There were some very moving speeches.) Being a woman was a high-risk occupation, a rich woman even more so; and Burney doesn't blink at intimating this. She also reveals the constant clash between the courtly ideals propagated both by chivalric romances (popular reading, although the novel is, of course, catching up fast) and mandatory social hypocrisy - and real life, in which men hold pretty much all the social cards and aren't afraid to assert their awareness of this: at a ball, the supposed acme of polite social gathering,
The gentlemen as they passed and repassed looked as if they thought we were quite at their disposal, and only waiting on the honour of their commands
- Evelina's instinctive reaction, she’d rather never dance at all than play along with that attitude. (Incidentally, there’s an intriguing continuum of literary disillusionment regarding balls; and it seems to be the preserve of women writers: think of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey at her first Bath assembly; Fanny in The Pursuit of Love - “This, then, was a ball”- the difference between the idea and the reality considerably more than one step; an implicit commentary on the designated trajectory of female experience.)
Then, there's the unexpected appearance in Evelina’s life of her grandmother, Madame Duval - shockingly, an unkind, unpleasant and unattractive personality; and, damningly, French at a time of exceptional national unpopularity (and competition, of course. You're probably thinking again of Johnson's London: A Satire - his rendering of Juvenal's Third Satire - with its substitution of a ubiquitous venal Frenchman for Juvenal's ubiquitous venal Greek; and you’re absolutely right.) The social embarrassment (and guilt at her embarrassment) Evelina feels in the company of her vulgar cousins, the Branghtons (Holborn, not the West End, in a world where these things matter - and it shows in everything they say and do): Burney is extraordinarily radical in her willingness to depart from established social scripts (including displaying a social range), whilst acknowledging their potency, and exploring the dramatic possibilities and psychological complexity inherent in that tension.
In Evelina's relations with the noisy, embarrassing Branghtons, she allows us to extrapolate, for instance, that snobbery isn't a simple matter of social one-upmanship: it's a (corrupted) recognition of power structures (by the 18thc increasingly euphemistically codified1. For instance, “delicacy”, aka adherence to the social mores of the ruling classes, is often postulated as innate, an unmediated expression of “natural” elegance, generally - although not always - contingent upon birth. Any positive “exceptions” found outside the assumed social boundaries are placed in honourable contention because the assumption is their “delicacy” represents an incongruous affinity with the dominant social order; a coded terminology that lasted well beyond the 18thc.) Consequently, snobbishness, in the guise of delicacy, good feeling and a preference for “good” society, becomes, for a young woman in Evelina's position, a necessary element of the toolkit for survival, an unacknowledged means of parlaying very limited agency, into security: a “good” marriage and, ideally, an unassailable social position. Evelina also hopes for love (a romantic expression of modernity also co-opted by the euphemistic code); so, her embarrassed reluctance to reveal her Holborn address to the aristocratic Lord Orville is also a tacit admission of her fear that she'll never see him again after such a revelation. Burney constantly tussles us back and forth through such arguments (a pattern mirrored, to an extent, in the novel's epistolary structure); but none of this is hammered home.
Part of her radicalism in this novel lies in her unaffected narrative of the life of an “ordinary” young woman; her adventures the social complexities and conundrums thrown up by moving through society:
all the little incidents…which form the natural progression of the life of a young woman of obscure birth, but conspicuous beauty [;]
beauty, like riches, being another double-edged sword in the armoury of a young woman; the clouded antecedents amounting almost to a leitmotif in the English 18thc novel - certainly French literary critics thought so
Illegitimate children, lost children rediscovered, peasants, unequal marriages1…
- representing both an extrapolation from the fairytale; and an exploration and discussion of a more robustly situated social unease, the natural concomitant of a rapidly changing and developing society. (And, in the learning to wield these assets, demonstrates an interesting progression from the noble undertakings of the chivalric romances - often featuring actual swords; in male hands, obviously - from which the novel as a form derived. The domestic cat rather than the lioness; savannah rules still apply.)
Burney wasn't the first novelist to favour the ordinary and the everyday (the realist novel has a longer backstory than some arguments allow); and rather punchily for a debut novelist, in her preface, she firmly (although with plenty of modest caveats) places herself on a spectrum that cites Rousseau, Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. This new author intends to be taken seriously, whatever she may disclaim. Even more extraordinary
I yet presume not to attempt pursuing the same ground which they have tracked; whence, though they may have cleared the weeds, they have also culled the flowers; and though they have rendered the path plain, they have left it barren.
On one level, of course, this can be read as another lavish compliment in line with “enlightened by the knowledge of…charmed by the eloquence…exhilarated by the wit”; but what really leaps out is though they may have cleared the weeds, they have also culled the flowers, the fact that in clearing the path: they have left it barren. This does not sound like unconditional endorsement of either the state of the novel as a form, or the works of her predecessors (however much she admires them). Instead we can see an ambitious young writer throwing her hat in the ring, determined to try her hand at what she sees as the remit of this nascent, slippery, infinitely regenerative art form; and take a hand in shaping it; even as she recognises its low status (“In the republic of letters, there is no member of such inferior rank, or who is so much disdained…as the humble Novelist”2), then tacitly refutes this, both through her predecessors and her own writing.
This moment arrived. Just going to Drury Lane Theatre. The celebrated Mr. Garrick performs Ranger. I am quite in ecstasy, so is Miss Mirvan. How fortunate that he should happen to play!…
The authority and apparent ease with which Burney captures Evelina's breathless excitement on her first visit to London, in this early letter, let's us know we’re in safe hands; rather engagingly (and demonstrating Burney’s commitment to psychological realism over moral phatics), Evelina, in asking her guardian if she may accept the invitation in a previous letter, has made all the dutiful noises, then allowed them to be overwhelmed by her enumeration of London’s delights, before finally admitting that, yes, she really wants to go. This is the “draw[ing] characters from nature” to which Burney committed in her preface; a facility much admired by another literary radical, Choderlos Laclos, author of the revolutionary (in several senses) Les Liaisons Dangereuses; (although he refers specifically to her second novel, Cecilia). He also, rather disappointingly, postulates what was to become part of the novel-writing mythology - the explanation that women were good at it because of their limitations:
Their upbringing and éducation, their way of life in society, all their praiseworthy qualities, and if I have to be frank, even their faults, promise them a success in this career which they would search for in vain elsewhere3.
Evelina is a sprightly, playful, happy novel, bristling with the energy and joie-de-vivre of a young (Burney was twenty-five) writer enjoying her story and the flexing of her muscles. Sadly, she never wrote publicly with such lack of self-consciousness and awareness of potential criticism again. And, of course, there's Lord Orville - the omnipresent in-the-nick-of-time gentleman (who acts like a gentleman) - kind, considerate, charming and good-looking. No wonder he set the standards for romantic heroes, well into the 19thc.
Moving on: maybe, you're interested in a fresh perspective on an existing literary narrative (because, of course, Evelina's a fresh take on an existing life narrative); parlaying the September newness into everyday life? In which case -
Next week!
Des bâtards, des enfans [sic] retrouvés, des paysannes, des mariages disproportionnés; Bibliothèque universelle des Romans (1783); quoted in Fanny Burney: Some notes on the Early Reception of Fanny Burney's Novels in France, Carmen M. Fernández Rodriguez; translation WTRI.
Although this wasn't so at the outset - when it was a male domain. There's definitely an argument that the perceived debasement of the novel was allied to both its popularity; and its success in the hands of women writers.
Leur éducation, leur existence dans la société, toutes leurs qualités louables, & s’il faut tout dire, quelques uns même de leurs défauts, leurs promettent, dans cette carrier, des sucès que selon nous, elles cherchroient vainement dans toute autre; Pierre Amboise Choderlos Laclos, Mercure de France (3 April, 1784); quoted Fernández Rodriguez, as above; translation WTRI. Also, just flagging up that - as with so many 18thc writers - Laclos' spelling is quite idiosyncratic…
(This incorporates material that's previously appeared on Substack in another form; and expands it considerably.)
Co-incidentally I'm reading Evelina for the first time, for a Literature of London online course. After a slow start (oh, those opening letters between her guardians!) I loved her wit and forthrightness.
How I would like to see Monsieur Laclos's face, when confronted with women surgeons and astronauts, let alone poets, philosophers, and essayists.