num_pages: 455
description: Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens, theatre visits, and balls. But Evelina's innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions—as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville. Evelina, comic and shrewd, is at once a guide to fashionable London, a satirical attack on the new consumerism, an investigation of women's position in the late eighteenth century, and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader.
language: English
title: Evelina
titlecomplete: Evelina
characters: Mrs. Mirvan, Mr. Lovel, Rev. Villars, M. Dubois, Lord Orville, Captain Mirvan, Mr. Macartney, Evelina Anville, Madam Duval, Sir Clement Willoughby, Maria Mirvan
genres: Historical Fiction, Historical, Novels, 18th Century, Literature, Classics, British Literature, Adult, Romance, Fiction
ratings_count: 16979
places: Somerset, England, London, England, Bristol, England, Bath, Somerset, England
publisher: Oxford University Press