A Celebration of Frances Burney

by Lorna J. Clark (editor)

On the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the writer Frances Burney (1752-1840), a window to her memory was placed in the arched recess of stained glass that graces Poets Corner. Novelist, playwright and diarist, Frances Burney is one of the few women accorded such an honour. She joins the likes of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot who might in some ways be seen as her literary heirs. Burney s journey to recognition on the stage of the world has been a long one, crowned finally with triumph. The service marked the mid-point of a two-day conference in which various aspects of Burney s life and achievement were canvassed. Her journals and letters, her novels and plays (both comedies and tragedies), her life, family and context were all given serious scholarly treatment. This volume includes the papers presented that day, which cover the many facets of a remarkable career and represent the broad spectrum of scholarly approaches to the entire opus of Frances Burney. It shows how far Burney has come from being dismissed as a minor precursor to Jane Austen to being recognized in her own right as a powerful, complex and influential writer, whose works had considerable impact on her own and subsequent generations.

250 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Lorna J. Clark is Research Adjunct Professor in the Department of English, Carleton University. Editor of the Burney Letter since 1999, she is a member of the board of the Burney Society of North America as well as the Editorial Board of The Burney Journal. She has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers in various journals. She has also contributed essays to the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. She recently edited a collection of essays, A Celebration of Frances Burney (2007), and a volume to the Women's Novels strand of the Chawton House Library Series, The Romance of Private Life (2008). Her 1997 edition of The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney was nominated for the British Council Prize for the Humanities and the Morton N. Cohen Prize for a Collection of Letters.