SOURCE: "Fanny Burney's 'Feminism': Gender or Genre?" in Fettered or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, Ohio University Press, 1986, pp. 29-39.

In the following essay, Brown answers feminist interpretations of Burney by insisting that seemingly feminist themes result from the romance tradition from which Burney drew her inspiration.

Reading older literature with modern glasses is a pervasive tendency. In the nineteenth century, this approach resulted in a propensity to judge eighteenth-century poetry by Romantic standards and to find it wanting. The novel too, has suffered from this sort of self-congratulatory measurement in the twentieth century, in which the yardstick was Jamesian realism. In the past few years, a different manifestation of this approach has been gaining in popularity as critics sift through the fiction of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women novelists, looking for evidence of latent feminism. Recent interpretations of Fanny...