SOURCE: "Evelina: Writing Between Experience and Innocence," in Woman as 'Nobody' and the Novels of Fanny Burney, University Press of Florida, 1992, pp. 9-30.

In the following essay, Cutting-Gray claims that Evelina's writing serves as a means of transcending societally imposed restrictions on women.

Thus ought a chaste and virtuous woman . . . lock up her very words and set a guard upon her lips, especially in the company of strangers, since there is nothing which sooner discovers the qualities and conditions of a woman than her discourse.

—Plutarch

A worldly wise, often subversive, journalist-narrator who represents herself as an inexperienced young rustic has intrigued, if not puzzled, the readers of Burney's first novel, Evelina. The fact that Evelina's innocence can only be seen from the narrator's perspective beyond innocence, that innocence is a reductive concept within the broader, reflexive context of writing is an important clue to the quixotic conduct...