Kristina Straub (Essay Date 1987)

SOURCE: Straub, Kristina. "The Receptive Reader and Other Necessary Fictions." In Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy, pp. 152-81. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987.

In the following excerpt, Straub examines Burney's self-awareness as an author as her career developed, particularly after the success of Evelina.

Evelina's fictional situation reflects Burney's own dilemma as a woman who sought solutions to female difficulties among conventional, patriarchal answers. Writing gave her aesthetic and imaginative choices among the options for women in patriarchal society that were not matched by her social and personal powers.¹ Burney could, in other words, easily endow her fictional heroine with the secure, emotionally based power over males that she, herself, could only gain with considerable difficulty, if at all, in life. Fiction is, then, as dangerous, in setting up false expectations, to Fanny Burney as Lord Orville is to Evelina...