Paying careful attention to the narrator’s final assessment in the conclusion of Camilla which attributes the lover’s pain to the two extremes of too little and too much experience, this article outlines Burney’s critique of a cultural preoccupation with gendered ideals of bildung. The novel exposes how contemporary models of education polarize experience through contradictory, self-defeating expectations of particularity and universality. The conflict between Mr. Tyrold’s education of Camilla and Dr. Marchmont’s advice to Edgar reveals how such models force that which should be entirely particular to one individual subject into a universally applicable standard, wholly eradicating any feminine particularity of character as entirely poisonous to marital happiness.