“The Stormy Sea of Politics”: The French Revolution and Frances Burney's The Wanderer

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

AbstractRecent challenges to the pivotal position that Walter Scott has been awarded in terms of the genesis of the historical novel have led to renewed interest in the origins and development of the form, as well as increasing awareness of the diversities of Romantic historical fiction. The variety available within the genre is manifest in the appearance of Frances Burney's The Wanderer and Scott's Waverley within the space of a few months in 1814. Both narratives responded to the momentous events of the French revolutionary period; however, Burney's model of history and fiction fell quickly out of view, arguably as a result of its cosmopolitan principles and Burney's revival of the question of “the wrongs of woman”. This article examines Burney's contribution to the field of Romantic historical fiction, emphasizing the significance of Burney's late historical novel. Tracing The Wanderer's composite historical portrayal of the initial moment of the French Revolution crisis, the article contends that the novel represented an attempt to reopen the broader social, economic and gender issues raised by the French Revolution debate in a period of renewed radical agitation. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 1.2 For more extended discussion of Scott's contemporary reception and the critical process of legitimation that began with Waverley, see Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991).3 T. H. Lister, “The Waverley Novels,” Edinburgh Review, 55 (Apr. 1832): 61–78 (65).4 Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority; Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997), 130.5 Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 115; Fiona Price, “Ancient Liberties? Rewriting the Historical Novel: Thomas Leland, Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34.1 (2011): 19–38, and “‘A Great Deal of History’: Romantic Women Writers and Historical Fiction,” Women's Writing, 19.3 (2012): 259–72.6 Anne H. Stevens, British Historical Fiction before Scott (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke, eds., Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (Albany: State U of New York P, 2001); Margaret Doody, “English Women Novelists and the French Revolution,” La Femme en Angleterre et dans les colonies americaines aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1975), 178–98.7 Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008).8 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1937; London: Merlin, 1962), 23.9 Morgan Rooney, The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790–1814: The Struggle for History's Authority (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2013), 14.10 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971), 247–48.11 Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre,” New Literary History, 17.2 (1986): 203–18 (210).12 See Ian Duncan, Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007).13 Harry Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1983), 11.14 Evan Gottlieb, “‘To be at Once Another and the Same’: Walter Scott and the End(s) of Sympathetic Britishness,” Studies in Romanticism, 43.2 (2004): 187–207 (189).15 Cited in James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), 13.16 Gottlieb, 190.17 Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000), 225.18 In The Spirit of the Age: Or Contemporary Portraits (London: Printed for Henry Colburn, 1825), Hazlitt famously complained that Scott propped “the actual throne by the shadow of rebellion” (148).19 Rev. of Waverley, by Walter Scott, British Critic, 2 (Aug. 1814): 189–211 (209).20 Frances Burney, The Wanderer, or, Female Difficulties, ed. Margaret Drabble (London: Pandora, 1988), 3. Subsequent references are to this edition and given parenthetically in the text.21 Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971), 3.22 Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 76.23 See Lukács, Historical Novel.24 Margaret Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1988), 318.25 In Frances Burney, Doody has argued that in some ways Elinor is not revolutionary enough, as her position of financial security renders her oblivious to Juliet's distresses and the manner in which financial considerations affect female experience. Doody's discussion links The Wanderer with Wollstonecraft's Maria, which juxtaposed the middle-class woman's focus on love and the restrictions of sexual freedom with the concerns of lower-class women with the economic restrictions placed on women who enter the marketplace. Doody also suggests that Elinor's defect lies in the fact that she does not focus on trying to free other women and “spends her energies on self-concern”. See Margaret Doody, “Burney and Politics,” The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 93–110 (108).26 Cited in Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 190.27 Cited in Epstein, 190.28 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992), 5.29 Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 15–16.30 Maria Jerinic, “Challenging Englishness: Frances Burney's The Wanderer,” Craciun and Lokke, 63–84 (64).31 Doody, Frances Burney, 325.32 For further discussion of Burney's representation of Robespierre, see Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). Craciun has argued that in The Wanderer, as well as Mary Robinson's The Natural Daughter and Helen Craik's Adelaide de Narbonne, Robespierre emerges as “a sexualised avatar of violent ambition, in effect the embodiment of men's Reign of Terror on Women” (117).33 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 85.34 Epstein, 187–88. Claudia L. Johnson has also highlighted that employment of the figure of the “female philosopher” did not always imply a strictly conservative agenda on the part of female authors. Johnson contends that within the novels of certain apparently conservative late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century female writers, such as Elizabeth Hamilton and Maria Edgeworth, strategic use of the figure of “the freakish feminist actually free[d] the author to advance reformist positions about women through the back door”. Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 20.35 The Wanderer's complex engagement with the subject of female difficulties has resulted in varying opinions of the nature of Burney's feminist critique. In her introduction to The Wanderer, Drabble has argued that Burney's portrait of Elinor “represents what she saw as the dangers of crossing the frontiers of known and approved conduct” (xiii), while Katherine M. Rogers has suggested that Burney used Elinor “to express her own protest against conventional restrictions on women, to respond to the theories of contemporary radical feminists Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hayes, and to indicate what was wrong with their position”. See Katherine M. Rogers, Frances Burney: The World of Female Difficulties (New York: Harvester, 1990), 153. In contrast, Epstein has emphasized Elinor's “unsettling textual effect” (187). Similarly, in Frances Burney, Doody has suggested that Burney's desire to arouse sympathy in the reader through Elinor's statements marks a wide difference between Burney's Jacobin Elinor and the parodic new thinkers of anti-Jacobin works, contending that The Wanderer indicates Burney's sympathy with Hayes' and Wollstonecraft's exploration of the manner in which false education prompts women to “regard sexual sensibility as all important while [they are] yet taught to conceal it” (338). In “Burney and Politics”, Doody identifies Elinor as an overtly political character, suggesting that Elinor is singular in Burney's works, “not only in that she is pro-revolutionary but also in that she openly espouses and articulates a clear ideology” (108).36 Epstein, 191.37 Rev. of The Wanderer, by Frances Burney, Critical Review, 5 (Apr. 1814): 405–24 (407).38 Doody, Frances Burney, 318; Epstein, 176.39 Rev. of The Wanderer, by Frances Burney, British Critic, 1 (Apr. 1814): 374–86 (385); Rev. of The Wanderer, by Frances Burney, Gentleman's Magazine, 84 (June 1814): 579–81 (579).40 Sarah Saliah, “Camilla and The Wanderer,” Sabor, 39–53 (46).41 Doody, Frances Burney, 318.42 Rev. of The Wanderer, Critical Review, 410.43 Rev. of The Wanderer, British Critic, 375.44 Doody, “Burney and Politics,” 109.45 Leanne Maunu, Women Writing the Nation: National Identity, Female Community, and the British–French Connection, 1770–1820 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2007), 254.46 [John Croker], Rev. of The Wanderer, by Frances Burney, Quarterly Review, 11 (Apr. 1814): 123–30 (130).47 [John Croker], 128; Rev. of The Wanderer, British Critic, 376.48 [William Hazlitt], Rev. of The Wanderer, by Frances Burney, Edinburgh Review, 24 (Feb. 1815): 320–38 (336, 337).49 [William Hazlitt], 337.50 Craciun, 187.51 Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 173.52 Rev. of The Wanderer, by Frances Burney, Monthly Review, 76 (Apr. 1815): 412–29 (416).Additional informationNotes on contributorsCarmel MurphyCarmel Patricia Murphy holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and History, a Master of Arts and a PhD from University College Cork, Ireland. Her PhD thesis, entitled “History, Revolution and the British Popular Novel: Historical Fiction in the Romantic Age”, offers a reappraisal of the pivotal position which Walter Scott has been awarded in terms of the genesis of the historical novel through its exploration of the significant political and historiographical role that historical fiction played within the French Revolution debate and its aftermath. Her research and teaching interests include the Romantic novel, historical fiction and the literature of the French Revolution crisis.