[In the following essay, Olshin contends that Evelina's “obscure birth,” not her ignorance and inexperience, is the driving force of the novel. The critic also faults Burney for failing to move past Evelina's search for a societal identity into deeper emotional territory.]

In the original preface to Evelina, Fanny Burney describes her heroine and problems that confront her:

[A] young female, educated in the most secluded retirement, makes, at the age of seventeen, her first appearance upon the great and busy stage of life; with a virtuous mind, a cultivated understanding, and a feeling heart, her ignorance of the forms, and inexperience in the manners of the world, occasion all the little incidents which these volumes record, and which form the natural progression of the life of a young woman of obscure birth, but conspicuous beauty, for the first six months after her Entrance into th. World.¹

Most studies of Evelina have tended to take Burney at her word and have elaborated on certain aspects of the work described in her statement: again and again, “the manners of the world” as they are portrayed in Evelina have been considered to be of major thematic importance.²

When the novel is closely examined—and Fanny Burney's own statement subjected to scrutiny—it becomes obvious that it is not Evelina's “ignorance … and inexperience [which] occasion all the little incidents which these volumes record.” Rather, it is her “obscure birth” that provides the novel with its central theme and basis for plot movement. The obscurity of Evelina's birth has an unexpectedly complex meaning: it is “hidden” in the sense that Villars has kept her true origins a secret, even though he is fully aware of them himself; and it is also “uncertain” since Villars has not established the parentage legally and, by creating a last name for Evelina, has allowed others to remain uncertain. The movement towards revealing the hidden and ascertaining the doubtful develops the theme of family, that set of connections which draws the characters and the parts of the novel together. Other families provide a basis for comparison with Evelina's own and function as a set of significant and shifting contexts in which to view the heroine. This movement itself becomes the plot: Evelina's search for her proper and ultimate family propels the book along. Moreover, because attitudes towards family determine attitudes towards society, Fanny Burney enables us to consider her portrait of Evelina's moral growth, not just her education in “forms, and … manners.”³

In the eighteenth century, the family exerted much of its influence as a social context, and each member was valued by those outside the family according to his relationship with his particular kinship group.⁴ This view lends poignance and drama to Evelina's situation as an “orphan” and underlies the surface meaning of her departure from Berry Hill: she exists, until the very end of the novel, as a random element in the eyes of others, a jewel without a setting. It is important that the novel begins with the story of her “lost” context; the opening letters between Lady Howard and Mr. Villars tell the story of Evelina's background and show how, though she has been provided with a loving guardian, the context he can provide is inappropriate to her blood as well as her merit:

Consider, Madam, the peculiar cruelty of her situation. Only child of a wealthy Baronet … whose name she is forbidden to claim; entitled as she is to lawfully inherit his fortune and estate, is there any probability that he will properly own her?

It seems … as if this deserted child, though legally heiress of two large fortunes, must owe all her rational expectations to adoption and friendship.

(p. 8)

Her “rational expectations,” of course, include those of a suitable marital partner, and it is here that she appears to be most at a disadvantage.⁵ Villars recognizes the importance of family name as a shorthand indicator for social context and knows that “Anville” is merely a statement of anonymity.

Emphasis in these early letters is on the importance of relationships and connections as they establish one's setting: the detailed family history—replete with references to mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, sons, and daughters—is necessary to convince the reader of Evelina's tragic dislocation. The very purpose of the first letter is to forward the request for “proofs of [the child's] relationship” to her grandmother. A foil pattern, which serves to underline the importance of the family as context, is provided by the Howards. Lady Howard concludes her letter with what seems to be a pleasantry:

My daughter and my grandchild join with me in desiring to be most kindly remembered to the amiable girl; and they bid me remind you, that the annual visit to Howard Grove, which we were formerly promised, has been discontinued for more than four years.

(p. 2)

The comment is, however, more than a pleasantry: on one hand, the reminder of the invitation links Lady Howard with Evelina's guardian-father; on the other, the mention of relatives neatly portrays the configuration of the writer's own family, which is a contrast to Evelina's. Lady Howard is a grandmother who joins with her daughter and grandchild; the pattern is similar, but the feeling is happily reversed, since separateness is all that Evelina has ever known from both her mother and grandmother. The writer's home, Howard Grove, is the visible symbol of a familial context and stands in opposition to the undesirably exotic city of Paris, the setting to which Madame Duval wishes to remove Evelina.

Interwoven with the story of Evelina's lost family is the description of her only current family, the widower Mr. Villars, who explains his connection and prolonged responsibility: “thus it has happened, that the education of the father, daughter, and granddaughter, has devolved on me” (p. 5). The point is that the novel is not a search for identity: Evelina is not a foundling as is Tom Jones. Rather, she is one whose true context is known and for whom a substitute context is temporarily provided by Villars.⁶ The next move, then, should be seen as part of this sequence; the journey to Howard Grove places Evelina in the middle of another substitute context—the protective, sensitive Lady Howard and the maternal Mrs. Mirvan, who assures Mr. Villars that “her two children shall equally share her time and her attention” (p. 12). The emphasis on connection is made again when Lady Howard writes of Evelina and Miss Mirvan: “I would have them love each other as sisters, and reciprocally supply the place of that tender and happy relationship to which neither of them has a natural claim” (p. 11). Lady Howard, her daughter, and granddaughter, then, are the normative context; and it is in this kind of family that Evelina should have grown up. Authorial values—aristocratic heritage, ancestral mansion, blood ties, generational links, maternal warmth—are made clear through them; it is only appropriate that they provide the context in which Evelina can travel to London in safety.⁷ It is in their company that she first meets Lord Orville, and it is from the context they provide that he deduces some clues about Evelina's social standing. Indeed, we learn much about his approbation from the detail of his lengthy conversation with Mrs. Mirvan (p. 27) and from his joining her at the ridotto (p. 33). It is because the Mirvan family forms a network around Evelina that Lord Orville draws appropriately positive conclusions. He does, however, make an effort to discover her true context—she suspects this (p. 23) and he admits it (p.25)—but he is not put off when he learns that “she must be a country parson's daughter” (p. 25).

Genuine risk enters the plot with the arrival of Madame Duval. She, and then the Branghtons, surround Evelina with a negative context. It has already been noted that some danger lies in Evelina's making wrong social decisions and that Fanny Burney's preface calls attention to Evelina's problematic “ignorance of the forms, and inexperience of the manners of the world.” However, it is not Evelina alone who may make incorrect judgments from deceptive appearances.⁸ Others, we learn, may incorrectly judge her from the deceptive appearance of her incorrect familial context. It is for this reason, I suggest, that she faints when confronted with the grandmother who has come to take her away. Hereafter, Evelina realizes she will have to be maritally assessed while in the company of “a tall elderly woman” with “something foreign in her accent” (38) who “dresses very gaily [and] paints very high” (42). The proportion of her distress is made clear in her letter to Mr. Villars:

But let me draw a veil over a scene too cruel for a heart so compassionately tender as your's; it is sufficient that you know this supposed foreigner proved to be Madame Duval,—the grandmother of your Evelina!

O, Sir, to discover so near a relation in a woman, who had thus introduced herself!—what would become of me, were it not for you, my protector, my friend, and my refuge?

My extreme concern, and Mrs. Mirvan's surprise, immediately betrayed me.

(pp. 40-41)

In an age when the grandmother would be read as the human setting for the jewel-like granddaughter, Evelina's fainting is not a melodramatic response but a correct assessment of the danger Madame Duval provides to her marital possibilities.

The issue is clearly articulated after Evelina has been forced to make the next step in contextual descent to the Branghtons:

During the last dance, I perceived … Sir Clement Willoughby. I was extremely vexed, and would have given the world to have avoided being seen by him: my chief objection was, from the apprehension that he would hear Miss Branghton call me cousin.—I fear you will think this London journey has made me grow very proud; but indeed this family is so low-bred and vulgar, that I should be equally ashamed of such a connection in the country, or anywhere. And really I had already been so much chagrined that Sir Clement had been a witness of Madame Duval's power over me, that I could not bear to be exposed to any further mortification.

(pp. 82-83)

Only once do the Branghtons appear desirable as a context, and that occurs when Orville sees Evelina in the company of prostitutes: “How vainly, how proudly have I wished to avoid meeting him when only with the Branghtons and Madame Duval;—but now, how joyful should I be had he seen me to no greater disadvantage!” (p. 223). This scene, however, shows not only the importance of social context for most ordinary observers but also the heroic individuality of Lord Orville. He continues to look at her “with the same politeness and attention” as he had when he encountered her “in a higher sphere” (p. 223). Such an attitude marks him as morally superior to all the other characters in the novel and makes him the appropriate provider of Evelina's ultimate context.⁹ A less noble, less perceptive figure such as Mrs. Beaumont had “distressed” and “embarrassed” Evelina by questions about her family (p. 266); when she is told that Evelina is a Belmont, she reacts with surprise and defensiveness:

the young lady's rank in life, your Lordship's recommendation, or her own merit, would, any one of them, have been sufficient to have entitled her to my regard; and I hope she has always met with that respect in my house which is so much her due; though, had I been sooner made acquainted with her family, I should doubtless have better known how to have secured it.

(p. 363)

Sir Clement Willoughby, too, feels confusion without the shorthand symbol of family name:

My intentions … are hardly known to myself. I think Miss Anville the loveliest of her sex; and, were I a marrying man, she, of all the women I have seen, I would fix upon for a wife: but I believe that not even the philosophy of your Lordship would recommend me to a connection of that sort, with a girl of obscure birth, whose only dowry is her beauty, and who is evidently in a state of dependency.

(p. 329)

He is wrong, of course, about Orville's “philosophy” since, when Evelina receives a proposal, it is from Orville himself:

“Not a few are the questions I have to ask Miss Anville: among them, the most important is, whether she depends wholly on herself, or whether there is any other person for whose interest I must solicit?”

“I hardly know, my Lord, I hardly know myself to whom I most belong.”

“Suffer, suffer me, then,” cried he, with warmth, “to hasten the time when that shall no longer admit a doubt!—when your grateful Orville may call you all his own.”

(p. 335)

The point, then, is that Orville—of impeccable context—offers himself to one whose context appears doubtful. Evelina, elated at the proposal, welcomes it in contextual terms: “The partiality of Lord Orville must not only reflect honor upon me, but upon all to whom I do, or may belong” (p. 338). Orville's love is well placed, of course, since Evelina proves to be of aristocratic lineage. Nevertheless, it adds some dimension to his notoriously wooden characterization that he proposes before her origins are known to him and later says, “Miss Belmont … can receive no lustre from family, whatever she may give to it” (p. 363).¹⁰ The marriage will place Evelina in the context she has long deserved; it is not only upper-class (as was the family into which she was born), but it can be socially recognized. That is, the connection between family and family as context has at last been established in Evelina's life. The jewel has been placed in the correct setting, and class endogamy has triumphed publicly for the benefit of all.

The solidification of the context, however, does not occur statically; the plot moves towards it as the search for context impels the action forward. More specifically, the goal is the discovery, revelation, and achievement of Evelina's true family. It is this kinship search and creation which stands behind the ordering of incidents. At Berry Hill, to begin with, her origins are known, but events are at a standstill. Her move to Howard Grove, then, is the catalyst for two events, both related to family: first, Lady Howard—now familiar with Evelina—takes the initiative in urging Villars to allow her to press Evelina's case with Lord Belmont; second, Evelina is enabled to meet her maternal grandmother. From that point in the novel onwards, the action can be seen as a kind of kin-collecting: Evelina first acquires the grandmother and then Mr. Branghton who, as Madame Duval's nephew, is Evelina's first cousin once removed.¹¹ The group is extended to include his three children, who are Evelina's first cousins twice removed.¹² While living with these relatives, she befriends a stranger, Macartney, who turns out to be her half-brother; and then, through his marriage to the woman who had been thought to be the daughter of Evelina's father (p. 349), she acquires a sister-in-law. The acquisition of Macartney is one of the steps which leads directly to the link with their father; and Macartney's existence, of course, eases the release of Dame Green's “bantling” (p. 306), so that Evelina may take her place as a daughter of Sir John Belmont (p. 360). The suicide rescue scene, then, has an ironic overtone: dramatically, Evelina aids a stranger who turns out to be her own half-brother; but strategically, his being her brother—and continuing to live—helps to bring the full story to light.

The plot reaches its conclusion by linking the acknowledgement by Evelina's father, the goal of the opening letters, with the acquisition of a husband, the goal of “entering the world” described in the later letters. When initially Lord Belmont writes that he refuses to see her, Evelina cries to Lord Orville “like an infant” (p. 338), but when Belmont recognizes her claim, Orville immediately goes to him asking for permission to marry her. Candidly, Captain Mirvan makes specific the direction of the plot:

As soon as the party was assembled, the Captain, abruptly saluting me, said, “So, Miss Belmont, I wish you joy; so I hear you've quarrelled with your new name already?”

“Me!—no, indeed, Sir.”

“Then please for to tell me the reason you're in such a hurry to change it?”

(p. 374)

The kin-collecting nears completion with the introduction of some members of Orville's family: his “relation,” Mrs. Beaumont; his sister, Lady Louisa Larpent; and the prospective fiance, Lord Merton (p. 258). These characters extend the reach of Evelina's family and add to the new context in which she will take her place. The bridge of movement from family to family is, of course, a social one, and the idea of family as context should make this clear; underlying this, however, are Burney's reticent hints about the biological propulsion and reproductive rhythm which push the family forward. Evelina phrases this in a characteristically delicate way when she writes to Villars in his role as adoptive father:

I could wish that you … knew Lord Orville. … I sometimes imagine, that when his youth is flown, his vivacity abated, and his life is devoted to retirement, he will, perhaps, resemble him whom I most love and honour.

(p. 61)

As the plot draws to its conclusion, bringing the marriage nearer and nearer, the number of explicit references to sexuality increases. The proposal scene, in fact, begins with sexual comedy which somewhat tempers the melodrama:

I know not how long we were together; but Lord Orville was upon his knees, when the door was opened by Mrs. Selwyn!—To tell you, Sir, the shame with which I was overwhelmed, would be impossible;—I snatched my hand from Lord Orville,—he, too, started and rose, and Mrs. Selwyn, for some instants, stood facing us both in silence.

At last, “My Lord,” said she, sarcastically, “have you been so good as to help Miss Anville to look for my books?”

“Yes, Madam,” answered he, attempting to rally, “and I hope we shall soon be able to find them.”

(p. 334)

Shortly afterwards, Orville himself calls attention to their potential intimacy:

“And can you wonder I should seek to hasten the happy time, when no scruples, no discretion will demand our separation? and when the most punctilious delicacy will rather promote than oppose, my happiness in attending you?”

(p. 336)

The sexual relationship underlying the romantic one is satirically noted by Mrs. Selwyn when she finds Orville and Evelina alone together in the arbor:

“So … still courting the rural shades! … don't let me disturb your meditations; you are possibly planning some pastoral dialogue.”

And, with this provoking speech, she walked on.

(p. 350)

Orville rushes after her to tell her of their coming marriage, putting an end to “all impertinent conjectures“(p. 350).

The references to sexuality in marriage make explicit the theme of family and the direction of the plot. The opening letter refers to Evelina as a “helpless orphan”: by the end of the novel, she is fully ensconced in a family replete with Duval, Branghton, Macartney, and Belmont relatives and has left them to create, with Orville, a new, yet continuing family. Burney allows her a momentary modesty at Orville's haste to marry (p. 361), but makes Villars' nuptial greeting a—somewhat morbid—wish for progeny: “And mayest thou … be … mourned by some remaining darling of thy affections—some yet surviving Evelina!” (pp. 387-88).¹³

Identifying the theme of family and seeing how this identification makes clear the ordering of incidents should allow us to move coherently from interpretive to evaluative criticism. Much work on Burney has, in fact, dealt with evaluation: it has been repeatedly perceived that somehow—despite a few fine moments—the novel falls short.¹⁴ Such perceptions, however, need to be aligned with the existing pattern of the novel; otherwise, it seems to me, pejorative opinions appear impressionistic, and the problem is not presented as integral to the aesthetic framework under consideration. Waldo S. Glock, for example, believes that Burney is concerned with a “theme of deception” and attempts to work with this theme to show why the novel misfires:

Instead of pursuing her theme of deception to the logical point of effecting a permanent change in Evelina … Instead of depicting Evelina as acquiring, after a series of misadventures and errors in judgment, the wisdom of accurately distinguishing truth from its false representation, Miss Burney resolves all problems by the simple but arbitrary device of Lord Orvell's avowal of love.¹⁵

It is certainly true that all problems are resolved by Lord Orville's proposal, yet the device, though simple, is not arbitrary. It is, rather, absolutely organic if it is seen as related to the search for family. In its simplicity, however, lies the difficulty, the chief feature which mars the value of Evelina: little moral change has been effected in the heroine and therefore, potentially, in the reader.

Evelina herself calls attention to the resemblance between Orville and “him whom I most love and honor” (p. 61), Villars: she never develops beyond the early pattern. As once her actions were based on the directives of Villars, so now—in the later incidents—are they based on her understanding of the wishes of Orville. Early in the novel, Villars had counselled her concerning her treatment of Madame Duval:

Secure of my protection, and relying on my tenderness, let no apprehensions of Madame Duval disturb your peace: conduct yourself towards her with all the respect and deference due to so near a relation, remembering always, that the failure of duty on her part, can by no means justify any neglect on your's.

(p. 43)

Evelina carries out her relationship with her grandmother just as Villars commands: she exhibits an obligation to duty rather than a feeling of love. Charity and understanding are notably absent. During the incident in which Captain Mirvan laughs at Madame Duval's pain from snuffing salts, for example, Evelina criticizes him for the loudness of his laughter rather than its cause (p. 66).

The highway robbery scene, however, best demonstrates the moral shallowness of the heroine. The reader, knowing as he does that Evelina has been instructed to treat her grandmother with respect, must feel some lack of conviction when he learns that she “flew to her [the injured woman] with unfeigned concern at her situation … and assured her of my real sorrow at her ill-usage” (p. 133). Our belief in Evelina's genuine concern is greatly tempered by the details chosen to describe her rescue:

Her dress was in such disorder, that I was quite sorry to have her figure exposed to the servants … however, the disgrace was unavoidable … she hardly looked human.

The servants were ready to die with laughter the moment they saw her.

(p. 134)

We are asked to believe that social and legal complexities—taken seriously by Evelina—stand in the way of her upbraiding Captain Mirvan on her grandmother's behalf; she can only “stammer” and be “fearful” (p. 138) and “disconcerted” (p. 139). When Madame Duval finally leaves for France, the scene is one of triumph for Evelina and indignity for the older woman; the grandmother believes she must protect her relationship with Monsieur Du Bois from the rivalry of her granddaughter (p. 236). The caricature portrayal of Madame Duval is consistent throughout the novel, but the point here is that a similar consistency exists for Evelina. No emotional maturation has taken place: Evelina has not learned to love.

When Orville becomes the chief shaper of Evelina's behavior, the consistency is undiminished. New paeans replace the old: “Oh! Lord Orville!—it shall be the sole study of my happy life, to express, better than by words, the sense I have of your exalted benevolence and greatness of mind!” (p. 369). While directed by Villars, Evelina had observed the humiliation of her grandmother; with Orville, she must watch “two poor old women” who are forced by a mirthful company to race each other. The attitude toward society recapitulates the attitude toward family, and exactly as she did before: she makes token protests and worries about form.¹⁶ One of the “poor creatures, feeble and frightened” (p. 293) falls to the ground, but Evelina is easily kept from helping her by Lord Merton's call, “No foul play!” (p. 294).¹⁷ It is Merton's involvement in the race, in fact, which provokes Orville's only response:

[He] looked very grave during the whole transaction. Doubtless he must be greatly discontented at the dissipated conduct and extravagance of a man, with whom he is soon to be so nearly connected.

(p. 293)

Evelina's attitude is severe in the same proportion; after describing the way in which the old woman “was too much hurt to move, and declared her utter inability to make another attempt” (p. 294), Evelina concludes, “We then went to the drawing-room, to tea” (p. 294).¹⁸

Burney blunts each scene which might allow her to use the theme of family to dramatize moral development as the growth of love: embarrassed by the Branghtons, Evelina prefers the seducer Willoughby to those who are merely vulgar (pp. 82-83); knowing that Macartney is eager to thank her and repay his debt, she nevertheless lets him wait indefinitely in the garden because their meeting might look socially incorrect to Orville (p. 285); competitive and watchful of snubs with Orville's younger sister, she is never able to be an understanding friend and guide (p. 322).¹⁹

True to her theme, then, and consistent—if mechanical—in her plotting, Fanny Burney falls short in a more complicated, more significant area, her understanding of ethical maturation. In a famous essay, Lionel Trilling has pointed out that the greatness of the novel as a genre lies “in its unremitting work of involving the reader himself in the moral life … suggesting that reality is not as his conventional education has led him to see it.”²⁰ Burney never makes such a suggestion: too readily, she dramatizes the easy rightness of received wisdom. She cannot make a heroine grow from a concern about her family as social context to a concern about them as individuals; from a preference for contemporary and superficial values to those that are timeless and lasting; from an attachment to a platitudinous didact to love for a worthy man. To the inestimable loss of her novel's merit, she can only have Evelina and Orville return to Berry Hill—after tea.

Notes

1. All quotations from Evelina or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World are from the Norton Library edition (New York: Norton, 1965). Page numbers will be given in parentheses. The original preface is reprinted on an unnumbered page before p. 1.

2. Austin Dobson, Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay). (London: Macmillan, 1903), describes the theme simply as a young lady's learning about the world (p. 62). Stressing manners, Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel (London: Witherby, 1934), 5:162, sees vulgarity as the principal theme of the central chapters. Walter Allen, The English Novel: A Short Critical History (London: Phoenix House, 1954), notes that Fanny Burney's characteristic theme was “a young girl's impressions of the social world, her mistakes in society …” (p. 89). Harrison R. Steeves, Before Jane Austen: The Shaping of the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965), describes “the bare theme” as “simple and romantic—a youngish man … in love with a charming but at first awkward girl” (p. 205). Joyce Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), devotes most of her discussion of the novel to class differences in dialogue (pp. 78-85) and repeats Burney's own description: “The great theme of Evelina … was the entrance of the young lady into the world …” (p. 22). Enlarging slightly on the repeated idea, Susan Staves, “Evelina; or, Female Difficulties,” Modern Philology 73 (1976), claims that the real theme is “Female Difficulties” (p. 369).

3. For a discussion of the family as the primary unit of socialization, see Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 10-11. Trumbach's work has been most helpful in placing Burney in historical perspective. Villars himself makes the relevant connection, urging a favorable interpretation of strangers because of “the ties of society” (p. 202).

   These other works have been most helpful to me in this study: Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); David Hunt, Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life in Early Modern France (New York: Basic Books, 1970); and Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962).

4. Trumbach, pp. 107-08. See his consideration of class endogamy and the “pride of family.”

5. Trumbach, p. 97, notes the importance of marriage as a way of establishing a woman's social standing.

6. The “search for a father” is mentioned by both Edward A. Bloom, intro to Evelina (New York: Oxford, 1968), p. xxvii, and James B. Vopat, “Evelina: Life as Art—Notes toward becoming a Performer on the Stage of Life,” Essays in Literature (Western Illinois University) (hereafter cited ELWIU), 2 (1975):51. It is important to remember that the father is known.

7. Jonathan Dietz and Sidonie Smith, “From Precept to Proper Social Action: Empirical Maturation in Fanny Burney's Evelina,” ECL [Eighteenth-Century Life], 3, No. 3 (1977):88, also make this point. They use it, however, to contrast the safety of “private families” with the dangers of urban life as Villars describes them (Evelina, p. 105).

8. Waldo S. Glock, “Appearance and Reality: The Education of Evelina,” ELWIU 2 (1975), cites the contrast between appearance and reality as “one of the themes with which Miss Burney seems most seriously concerned” (p. 33). He notes, though, that “that particular thematic aspect of Evelina is not developed thoroughly and consistently” (p. 33).

9. Edward W. Copeland, “Money in the Novels of Fanny Burney,” Studies in the Novel (North Texas State University) 8 (1976):27, discusses the chronology of the novel by saying that “enough time must pass for Lord Orville to see her virtues shining out from the thicket of rude and crude relations that surround her. …” Certainly, this is one of Evelina's concerns, but not Orville's. Rose Marie Cutting, “Defiant Women: The Growth of Feminism in Fanny Burney's Novels,” Studies in English Literature 17 (1977):520, allows Orville no moment of spontaneity; she describes Evelina's task as “learning to conform to society's expectations in order to earn the love of the hero.” See Orville's own explanation of being “quite off his guard” (Evelina, p. 371).

10. Bloom, p. xxiii, calls the declaration of love “ritualistic,” but I believe that Orville's explanation shows it as emotional, voluntary, and impulsive. Such a detail may, in fact, link the novel to an emerging historical trend: the romantic marriage appears gradually to have replaced the arranged marriage. Trumbach's book documents this thesis.

11. Mr. Branghton is described as Madame Duval's nephew (p. 56), but she calls him “cousin” (p. 151). The term “cousin” could be applied to a nephew as kinship relations were then interpreted; see Trumbach, pp. 293-94.

12. In a repetition of family history, Evelina is urged to marry her cousin Tom, a great nephew of Madame Duval (p. 227), just as her mother had been urged to marry a cousin who was the nephew of Monsieur Duval (p. 4).

13. Staves, p. 379, notes that one of the “Female Difficulties” of the age was that women were forced to pretend ignorance about sexuality, but the sexual references here seem to be unmistakable. The plot concludes, in fact, with not just one marriage but three—a distinct resemblance to the dramatic comedies which celebrate fertility: Evelina's match is paralleled by Polly Green's with Macartney and Polly Branghton's with Mr. Brown.

14. Steeves, in his final chapter, compares Burney most unfavorably with Jane Austen and cites examples of her flawed artistry (p. 369). Staves, p. 368, calls the novel “hopelessly trivial.” Dietz and Smith attempt to rescue it, but their article is not convincing since Orville merely replaces Villars; little maturation appears to take place.

15. Glock, p. 41.

16. Allen, p. 91, connects these scenes by saying that the modern reader “is conscious now only of embarrassment.”

17. Critics such as Steeves, Cutting, Staves, and Dietz and Smith have called attention to the moral flaws in the novel. I have tried to make explicit a specific network—theme, plot, and ethical development—in order to demonstrate exactly where the failure of creative nerve takes place.

18. As Michael E. Adelstein, Fanny Burney (New York: Twayne, 1968), points out, “ … there is no evidence in the novel that Fanny is slyly satirizing her heroine” (p. 37).

19. One is, of course, tempted here to contrast Fanny and Lady Louisa with Elizabeth and Georgianna Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth is certain to be a force for good—but Evelina?

20. “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” The Kenyon Review (Winter, 1948); rpt. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Doubleday: Garden City, New York, 1950), p. 215.