Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Vol. 2: 1774-1777

Hugh Oliver is Editor-in-Chief, OISE Press.

Most of the world has never heard of Fanny Burney. A few will know of
her as the first woman novelist writing in English to achieve artistic
stature. Fewer still will have read her most influential novel, Evalina.
In short, this second volume of her journals and letters is directed to
a fairly small coterie of English scholars. It is expertly and
extensively annotated by Troide, a professor of English at McGill.

Burney was blessed with profound insight into the foibles and
limitations of the human condition, and was gifted with an Austen-like
economy of expression in writing about the people whom she met. In the
years covered by this volume, these were chiefly the acquaintances of
her father, a well-known musician whose reputation attracted to the
Burney household such distinguished visitors as Garrick, Doctor Johnson,
and the explorer “Abyssinian” Bruce. Among the comments and entries
reflecting the manners and mode of genteel eighteenth-century London is
a charming controversy in which she rebuffs the attention of a suitor
regarded as a highly desirable husband by most of her friends and
family.

Obviously this is not a book for the casual reader, and had I not been
sent it to review, I doubt I would have chosen to read it myself. But,
in fact, it is a lot more entertaining than one might suppose.