Camilla

Frances Burney's Camilla (1796) is a capacious novel of manners tracing Camilla Tyrold's perilous passage through courtship, credit, family obligation, and moral misinterpretation. Its lively third-person narration, comic dialogue, and minute analysis of embarrassment and self-command place it in the line of Richardsonian sensibility and Fieldingesque social comedy, while unmistakably anticipating Austen. Burney turns the marriage plot into a searching inquiry into female education, economic dependence, and the hazards of reputation. Burney (1752-1840), celebrated author of Evelina and Cecilia, was also a brilliant diarist and observer of elite society. Daughter of the music historian Charles Burney and later Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, she knew both literary celebrity and the constrictions imposed on women in polite culture. Camilla draws on this intimate knowledge of surveillance, etiquette, and precarious female agency. Readers interested in the development of the English novel will find Camilla indispensable: witty, humane, sometimes anxious, and richly detailed. It rewards patience with a profound portrait of youthful error, social pressure, and moral growth.