SOURCE: “‘To Whom I Most Belong’: The Role of Family in Evelina,” in Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 6, No. 1, October, 1980, pp. 29-42.

In the following essay, Olshin contends that Evelina's “obscure birth,” not her ignorance and inexperience, is the driving force of the novel. The critic also faults Burney for failing to move past Evelina's search for a societal identity into deeper emotional territory.

In the original preface to Evelina, Fanny Burney describes her heroine and problems that confront her:

[A] young female, educated in the most secluded retirement, makes, at the age of seventeen, her first appearance upon the great and busy stage of life; with a virtuous mind, a cultivated understanding, and a feeling heart, her ignorance of the forms, and inexperience in the manners of the world, occasion all the little incidents which these volumes record, and which form the natural progression of the life of a...