Frances Burney - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Written in epistolary form, Evelina portrays the English upper middle class from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old woman who has reached marriageable age. A comic and witty novel, the work is ultimately a satire of the kind of oppressive masculine values that shaped a young woman’s life in the eighteenth century, as well as of other forms of social hypocrisy. Encyclopædia Britannica describes Evelina as a "landmark in the development of the novel of manners”.

In choosing to narrate the novel through a series of letters written by the protagonist, Burney made use of her own previous writing experience to recount the protagonist’s views and experiences to the reader. This tactic has won praise from critics, past and present, for the direct access to events and characters that it allows to the reader, and for the narrative sophistication that it demonstrates in reversing the roles of narrator and heroine. The authors of Women in World History argue that she draws attention to difficulties faced by women in the eighteenth century, especially those surrounding questions of romance and marriage. She is described as a “shrewd observer of her times and a clever recorder of its charms and its follies”. What critics have consistently found unique and interesting about her writing is the introduction and careful treatment of a female protagonist, complete with character flaws, “who must make her way in a hostile world”. These are recognisable as features of Jane Austen’s writing, and show Burney’s influence on the later author’s work.

A testament to its popularity, the novel went through four editions before the end of its print run. In 1971 it was still considered a classic by the writers of Encyclopædia Britannica, which stated that “addressed to the young, the novel has a quality perennially young”.