Evelina - Fanny Burney

     Published anonymously in 1774, Evelina or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World is an epistolary novel, related in a series of letters.  It immediately became the 'hot read' of the time and the true author revealed.  The letters give seventeen year-old Evelina's perspective on the social lives of women in a male-oriented culture.  It is a witty, comic novel that satirizes English aristocracy and their social pretenses.
     Evelina is the unacknowledged, legitimate daughter of an English aristocrat who is raised by a vicar in rural seclusion until she is seventeen.  The Evelina's captivating innocence and lack of knowledge of society's rules lead to misunderstandings and embarrassing social errors when she is thrust into London society.  At her first ball she commits a terrible faux pas.

     "A confused idea now for the first time entered my head of something I had heard of the rules of an assembly; but I was never at one before - I have only danced at school - and so giddy and heedless I was, that I had not once considered the impropriety of refusing one partner, and afterwards accepting another."

Her honor is questioned by the first and defended by the second, beginning the pursuit of Evelina by several eligible society bachelors.
      The story is complicated by disguised identities, misplaced fortunes, and questionable intentions.  The heroine's entry into society, womanhood, and love along with the novel's notions of sensibility and romanticism were influential in the later writings of Jane Austen.  If you are a Jane Austen fan, you will love this book!

Portrait of Fanny Burney

Best Lines: (from my favorite scene where two young gentlemen devise an unorthodox way of settling a bet)
"I asked him how the bet was to be settled?  He told me that, to his great satisfaction, the parties had been prevailed upon to lower the sum from one thousand to one hundred pounds, and that they had agreed it should be determined by a race between two old women, one of whom was to be chosen by each side, and both were to be proved more than eighty years of age, though, in other respects strong and healthy as possible."


- Frances