Frances Burney, Dramatist: Gender, Performance, and the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage

by Barbara Darby

Overview

Frances Burney's position as a novelist, journalist, and letter-writer is now undisputed, thanks to reevaluations of the canon in recent years. During her lifetime (1752-1840) she won fame as a novelist, yet she was always intrigued by, and wrote for, the stage. Though only one of Burney's plays was performed in her lifetime, Barbara Darby places them in the context of performance and feminist theory and casts a new light on past assertions about Burney based entirely on her novels and journals. Darby maintains that in exposing the failure of such practices and institutions as courtship, marriage, the family, government, and the church, Burney's drama rivals her fiction in the depth of its social commentary.

In her four comedies and four tragedies (one of the latter incomplete), Burney uses stage space, dialogue, blocking, and gesture to highlight the ways power is distributed between society's members. According to Darby, these plays show that the eighteenth-century female experience was dominated by physical, psychic, and emotional regulation that included bodily punishment and the limitation of personal choice.

Placing Burney alongside other prominent female playwrights of the period, Darby's study brings to light a substantial and complex body of work, revealing that Burney's drama was not a casual sideline to her novel writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813193786
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	12/14/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Barbara Darby received her Ph.D. from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Editorial Reviews

A coherent, detailed account of the plays and a welcome addition to the growing bibliography of Burney studies.

Notes and Queries

Original, challenging and intellectually rigorous; her take on Burney as a writer is nuanced and provocative.

The Burney Letter

Discusses fully and convincingly the importance of these plays, both to Burney's career and to the history of women's writing and women's cultural position in the eighteenth century.

Janice Farrar Thaddeus

Reading the plays as both literary texts and as texts for performance, and grounding her critical practice in materialist feminism, Darby finds Burney exposing not only gender ideology, but familial ideology as oppressive to women.

1500-1900 Studies in English Literature

Original... has the merit of balancing theatrical with literary perspectives.

La Questione Romantica

Darby finds Burney exposing not only gender ideology but familial ideology as oppressive to women.... A lucid, careful, well-researched book.

Choice

"Darby finds Burney exposing not only gender ideology but familial ideology as oppressive to women.... A lucid, careful, well-researched book." — Choice

"Discusses fully and convincingly the importance of these plays, both to Burney's career and to the history of women's writing and women's cultural position in the eighteenth century." — Janice Farrar Thaddeus

"Original... has the merit of balancing theatrical with literary perspectives." — La Questione Romantica

"A coherent, detailed account of the plays and a welcome addition to the growing bibliography of Burney studies." — Notes and Queries

"Reading the plays as both literary texts and as texts for performance, and grounding her critical practice in materialist feminism, Darby finds Burney exposing not only gender ideology, but familial ideology as oppressive to women." — Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

"Original, challenging and intellectually rigorous; her take on Burney as a writer is nuanced and provocative." — The Burney Letter

From the Publisher