SOURCE: "Statues, Idiots, Automatons: Camilla" in Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the J 790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen, The University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 141-64.

In the following essay, Johnson contends that Burney's heroines characterize her ideal of feminine propriety.

Frances Burney's heroines have a passion for abjection. Their careers evince it with an extravagance at once grotesque and festive. At times, their suffering is nuanced enough to be a credit to sensibility. When they blush with exquisitely intense embarrassment over faux pas and contretemps—take Evelina's evolving sensitivity to the manners of high life, for example—they show that their affective lives are perfectly calibrated to the social practices of their culture, practices whose worldliness, venerated by the "ton," seems to call for the sophistication the English associate with the French. More often, however, their affliction burgeons beyond all seemly proportions, as when Cecilia loses...