The Burney Journal

Editor's Note

2024-10-18T14:40:37-04:00

Three Burneys in the Crewe White Album

2024-10-18T14:44:56-04:00

Charles Burney, patriarch of the Burney family, wrote hundreds of occasional poems during his long lifetime. While many of these verses celebrate intimate family occasions, others were tactical advances in Burney’s lifelong professional and social upward striving, which reached its apex in the first years of the nineteenth century when three generations of Burney gentlemen – Charles Burney Sr., Charles Burney Jr., and Charles Parr Burney – inscribed their verses into the White Album at Crewe Hall, thereby joining a scribal society of social, political, and cultural elites in offering tribute to their hostess Frances Greville Crewe, a great beauty, wit, aristocratic Whig hostess, and lifelong friend and patroness of Burney. (A misattribution of one of those poems is corrected.)

E-Burney, Green Burney, and Public(an) Burney

2024-10-18T14:51:33-04:00

The two famous portraits of Frances Burney, painted by her cousin Edward Francisco Burney in the 1780s, are recontextualized in light of the author’s discovery in 2021 of a mural inspired by the portraits, painted by the art duo id-iom in a pub in the Streatham area of southwest London. The article uses material heuristics to address the transmodalization of celebrity culture and sociability in a contemporary pop artwork. The article is accompanied by an interview with id-iom.

"Tres Liez Ensemble" Sarah Harriet Burney and her Publishing Liaisons

2024-10-18T15:12:40-04:00

The business of books, in the Romantic Period in Britain, was a pan-European affair. A new kind of publisher began marketing fiction on both sides of the Channel. The resulting competition to publish novels – and series of “classic”, “popular” and “modern” works for eager readers – involved multiple agents. In this article, I look at Sarah Harriet Burney’s relationships with London-based publishers and booksellers the Robinsons, Henry Colburn, Dulau and Thomas Tegg. I argue that she is an author whose career should be read in the context of work on women writers’ understanding of themselves as “professionals”. In examining some intriguing passages from Sarah Harriet’s correspondence as well uncovering evidence provided by rare books, and publishers’ archival material, I reveal her talents as an accomplished networker, and as one who played a mediatory role for publishers on the make. Sarah Harriet is revealed, too, as an editor and translator of fiction, and as a writer who contributes to the extensive cross-Channel exchange in the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.

A Lifetime in Writing

2024-10-18T15:16:08-04:00

For the historical linguist of English, Burney’s extraordinary body of extant prose presents an exciting opportunity to study idiolectal change and continuity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Burney’s long life, consistent writing habit, and large body of digitized text have enabled an idiolectal corpus of over 3 million words of prose to be compiled. This paper reports the findings of computational linguistic research conducted using this corpus, using statistical modelling to examine Burney’s use of dual-form adverbs. This modelling highlights Burney’s responsiveness to targeted linguistic prescriptivism, showing that she made widespread and persistent idiolectal reforms to an adverb paradigm highlighted in a 1796 review of Camilla by the Monthly Review. The modelling also reveals that this change did not spread by analogy to other adverb paradigms. These results highlight the potential for computational research to facilitate explorations into the extent, complexity, and nuance of Burney’s responsiveness to external stimuli, such as overt prescriptions or more subtle markers of sociolinguistic prestige.

"There Was Nothing She Could Teach"

2024-10-18T15:19:41-04:00

Miss Margland, a minor governess character in Frances Burney’s 1796 novel Camilla, is rarely discussed by literary critics. This article, which engages with recent critical examinations of Burney’s work in relation to Bildung and the marriage plot, argues that Miss Margland’s peripherality, insignificance and incompetence enable her to draw attention to the inhibitions that social and narrative conventions place upon the complex and meaningful development of women. The theories of Pierre Bourdieu are used both to highlight the governess’s particular investment in misrecognizing the economic foundations of cultural dominance, and to show how her wielding of unofficial power allows her to reveal the rules and paradoxes governing courtship and marriage. Sustained comparisons between Miss Margland and Camilla demonstrate how the governess acts as a catalyst for the heroine’s Bildung, and exposes the injustice of being compelled to submit to social codes and behaviors that limit women’s education and development.

Year in Burney Studies 2021

2024-10-18T15:22:00-04:00

N/A