The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney: Volume II: 1774-1777

Fanny Burney author Lars E Troide editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:27th Sep '90

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney: Volume II: 1774-1777 cover

The years 1774-1777 saw Fanny Burney's increasing occupation with her novel Evelina, which she finally completed and presented to the publisher Thomas Lowndes. Like her novel, the journals of this period reveal her artistic powers as she continues to sketch characters with economy and precision and create convincing narratives out of the events of her life. Among the more memorable figures she meets at her father's London house are the `noble savage' Omai, the first Tahitian brought back to England; the famed explorer James `Abyssinian' Bruce, who returned from Africa with tales of natives who ate raw flesh; and Prince Aleksei Orlov of Russia, who had murdered Czar Peter III in order to permit Peter's wife Catherine (`the Great') to ascend the throne. Other notable figures include Dr Samuel Johnson and the great singer Lucrezia Agujari, admired by Mozart. Also in these pages the usually diffident Miss Burney takes charge of her destiny by rebuffing her suitor Thomas Barlow, who has wealth, education, good looks, and the vehement approval of most of her family, but whom she finds a total bore.

`... edited as scrupulously as ever ... There is a great deal of pleasure and information to be gleaned from these journals ...' Ian A. Bell, Times Literary Supplement
'Lars Troide and his colleagues haven't quite managed to resurrect the burnt volumes, but they have done very ingenious things with the manuscripts that remain. As a result the first two volumes of this new edition contain a wealth of newly recovered material, making about twenty per cent of the total in the first volume ... these volumes give a vivid impression of what it meant to be young, gifted and female in eighteenth-century England. The scrupulous editing makes them excellent complements to Joyce Hemlow's massive edition of the later journals.' Jane Spencer, University of Exeter, Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 1, Number 2, November 1991
'Troide's annotations are not only meticulous and consistently pertinent; they also point to the dire need for more scholarship on the London music world in the 1770s' John A. Dussinger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Modern Language Review, Vol. 87

ISBN: 9780198125822

Dimensions: 212mm x 145mm x 25mm

Weight: 512g

336 pages