Francis Burney (1742-1840)
"Novelist, Playwright, and Austonian Inspiration"
Francis Burney is one Jane Austen’s greatest influences. In fact the title Pride and Prejudice, many readers speculate may have stemmed from the last few pages of Burney’s novel Cecilia, “remember: if to pride and prejudice you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to pride and prejudice you will also owe your termination.” From this quote alone one can see the wry humor Burney uses to write her novels, and like Austen Burney’s novels have much to say about the politics of society around her characters, as she uses satire, a quick wit, and dramatized situations to comment on the ills of society.
Burney began her career as writer in a society where the public domain belonged to men, and women, despite their potential to talent were crippled by a man’s honorable intentions to preserve her reputation. In Burney’s case, her father heavily monitored her writing, encouraging the act itself but limiting much of her work from publication, especially her plays. This pushed Burney toward the realm of the novel, and four of them became published, beginning with her most popular novel, Evalina.
Burney’s Evalina is a satirical hit about a beautiful, intelligent, yet naïve girl exposed and almost forced into formal society. Her fresh eyes and intelligent perspective serve as the window in which the reader views society. Burney uses her humor, much like Austen, to critique male-driven society where women are merely objects of pleasure or pawns of fortune and where female agency is nonexistent. Along with Evalina, her other works that influenced Austen, Cecilia: Memoirs of an Heiress, Camilla: A Picture of Youth, deal with moral, innocent, intelligent, and beautiful young women who, though with faultless intentions, fall into turmoil that deal with the beginnings of the seemingly normal social situations that lead to, unlike Austen, far more dramatic happenings.
Unlike Austen, Burney displays her opinion of society with satiric melodrama, and does not bother with subtlety. Like Austen she has characters that conceal their amorality with manners, social grace, or general good looks, but she swings far beyond Austen’s villains that reveal their demonic intentions through rude comments, instead they resort to actual violence. For instance, in Camilla, the handsome evildoer Alphonso Bellamy forces Eugenia, his helpless victim to obtain money from her uncle at gunpoint.
Though Austen does not go as far as using violence to depict the evils of society, she certainly draws inspiration from Burney’s satire, using moment of impropriety and breaches of etiquette to highlight aspects of society she finds trivial. For instance, she highlights characters that lack, in Austen’s opinion, important attributes to a morally sound character by behaving well within the demands of societal etiquette, but with selfish disregard that transcends beyond impeccable manners, and in true Austen methodology, she portrays this in the perfect hue of irony, invoking a good chuckle and displaying a great adaptation of Burney’s work.