The Burney Journal

Review of Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel, by Zoe McGee

2026-03-18T06:39:34-04:00

Review: British Women Novelists and the Review Periodical, by Megan Peiser

2026-04-25T10:37:56-04:00

“Are we not all the creatures of one Creator?”

2025-12-16T04:35:29-05:00

“Are we not all the creatures of one Creator?”: Frances Burney and Catholic Suffering

Miss Morland—my stupid sister has mistaken all your clearest expressions. You talked of expected horrors in London—and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George’s Fields.

–– Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Henry Tilney’s flippant allusion to the 1780 Gordon Riots implies women’s incapacity to see the connections between history, the novel, Englishness, and Catholic suffering. The work of Frances Burney, one of the novelists lauded in Northanger Abbey’s defense of novel reading, obviates such a suggestion. England’s violent anti-Catholic history and Burney’s own Catholic familial ties haunt her work, especially as the violence of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars increasingly impacted her life after marriage to a French émigré and the experience of exile in France during the Napoleonic wars. In her 1793 pamphlet Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy, an appeal to British women for support of refugee priests who had fled revolutionary France, Burney contrasts detailed imagery of brutally lawless Catholic France to a vision of a bountiful, magnanimous, and peaceful Protestant Britain. Ultimately, her strategic alignment of victimized French priests with charitable British women foments sympathy across gendered, national, and religious identity. Burney furthers this ecumenical project in her late novel, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (1814). Set in the 1790s and composed piecemeal from that period through Burney’s ten-year exile in France, The Wanderer represents painfully vulnerable women haunted by the specter of Catholicism, cast out from Revolutionary France and unwelcome on English shores. While tropes of violence manifest throughout her oeuvre, at this time in history and Burney’s own life, gendered power and religious freedom prove inextricably intertwined. Burney’s sentimentalized but nevertheless detailed and frighteningly real depictions of anti-Catholic violence and realistic gender-based violence not only function to encourage empathy across difference but also contribute to the burgeoning rhetoric of human rights that enables humanitarian action.

“This Day is Published"

2025-11-06T10:22:31-05:00

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“Man develops but little, though he experiences much:”

2025-11-06T10:14:50-05:00

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.

Gender-bending Heroism

2025-11-06T10:18:56-05:00

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Editor's Note

2026-04-22T04:43:56-04:00

Year In Burney Studies 2026

2026-03-16T07:36:28-04:00