Novel Developments: Frances Burney and the Rise of the Heiress Novel (conference paper)
Beth Cortese
Fanny Burney’s novels Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782) move between the margins and the mainstream in their exploration of inheritance practice in relation to women, accounts of an heiress who moves from the country to the city in Cecilia and the central plot of Evelina, in which a foundling discovers she has a family and an inheritance. This paper how Burney’s presentation of the heiress’ legal rights and agency commented on the complexity of inheritance practice, transporting the heiress from the margins of legal discourse to the centre of fictional plots. I will consider the features that characterised the new genre of heiress novels penned by Burney and her eighteenth-century contemporaries. Eileen Spring in Law, Land and Family has observed that the heiress is simply a ‘transmitter of inheritance’ (p. 13). Fiction questions and explores the extent to which the heiress was owner and agent of her own property and this is foregrounded in the tension between spatial freedom and confinement in heiress novels.
This paper is scheduled for presentation at the Locating the Burneys: from the Margins to the Mainstream Conference of the Burney Society (Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln U.K., 30th July-1st August 2019)
