SOURCE: "Cecilia," in The History of Fanny Burney, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1958, pp. 139-68.

In the following essay, Hemlow chronicles the historical context that prompted Burney's writing Cecilia.

Heavens! what a life of struggle between the head and the heart!

Cecilia, v. x. 6

The publication of Evelina, which introduced Fanny Burney into the Streatham group and thus into the London world, put an end to her fortunate and spontaneous habit of writing for its own happy ends. No one can know, of course, what work she might have produced if she had been left to her own quiet ways. The protests that she made on being thrust into public notice indicate that one of the genial conditions of her growth had been the screen that shielded her from the disapproval or opprobrium easily incurred by the wit or novelist. Anonymity had afforded temporary security and made for...