Evelina: “can your Ladyship be serious in proposing to introduce her to the gaieties of a London life?”

1/ Evelina, her mother dead and her father not acknowledging her, has been raised by Rev. Arthur Villars in the country. She is now 17 and Lady Howard invites Evelina to spend some time with her, her daughter Mrs Mirvan, and her granddaughter Miss Maria Mirvan at Howard Grove. The plot is kicked into action when Evelina joins Mrs and Miss Mirvan to London, despite Rev. Villars’s misgivings, to meet Captain Mirvan (Mrs Mirvan’s husband) after a seven-year separation. Then in London, she runs into her grandmother Madame Duval, an immoral woman who broke relations with her daughter and only recently learnt about Evelina’s existence. 

The full title of the book is Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, so it’s about all the misassumptions, misunderstandings, and mishaps as Evelina figures her way through the fashionable world of London. 

You can see why such a plot is great material for a comedy of manners. 

Then what are the similarities between Evelina and the novels of Jane Austen—in other words, the things that Jane Austen appears to have learnt or taken from Frances Burney? The genre comedy of manners; a lovable female protagonist, a romantic interest, some obstacles, a few “odious creatures” (such as Mr Loval and Sir Clement Willoughby in Evelina or Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice), vulgar characters, embarrassing relatives; a gift for capturing different voices and manners of speaking; a bright, light, and sparkling quality. 

Here, when I say the novels of Jane Austen, I mostly mean Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park is sombre and not a comedy of manners; Emma and Persuasion, despite having some of these features, are also very different in tone. 

As I have seen Jane Austen’s development as a writer, I’m curious about Frances Burney’s later novels. 

2/ Some of the humour in Evelina is in the spats between Captain Mirvan and Madame Duval, Evelina’s ridiculous grandmother, who pretends to be French. 

“This entertainment concluded with a concert of mechanical music: I cannot explain how it was produced, but the effect was pleasing. Madame Duval was in ecstasies; […] and, in the midst of the performance of the Coronation Anthem, while Madame Duval was affecting to beat time, and uttering many expressions of delight, [Captain Mirvan] called suddenly for salts, which a lady, apprehending some distress, politely handed to him, and which, instantly applying to the nostrils of poor Madame Duval, she involuntarily snuffed up such a quantity, that the pain and surprise made her scream aloud. When she recovered, she reproached him with her usual vehemence; but he protested he had taken that measure out of pure friendship, as he concluded, from her raptures, that she was going into hysterics.” (Vol.1, Letter 19) 

They constantly argue, constantly provoke each other. Madame Duval also provides lots of laughs for Captain Mirvan when she and her French companion, Monsieur DuBois, fall over and get completely soaked in the mud. Frances Burney is very, very funny. 

Later: 

“… we had hardly turned out of Queen Ann Street, when a man, running full speed, stopt the coach. He came up to the window, and I saw he was the Captain’s servant. He had a broad grin on his face, and panted for breath. Madame Duval demanded his business: “Madam,” answered he, “my master desires his compliments to you, and-and-and he says he wishes it well over with you. He! he! he!-”

Madame Duval instantly darted forward, and gave him a violent blow on the face; “Take that back for your answer, sirrah,” cried she, “and learn not to grin at your betters another time. Coachman, drive on!”

The servant was in a violent passion, and swore terribly; but we were soon out of hearing.” (Vol.1, Letter 21) 

Is it just me, or is this kind of broad humour—crude and violent—more like Henry Fielding than Jane Austen? There seems to have been a shift in sensibilities.

The prank that Captain Mirvan later plays on Madame Duval especially feels like something in the vein of Joseph Andrews, which traces back to Don Quixote—you obviously don’t get that in Jane Austen but I don’t think you find it in Victorian novels either.  

3/ Generally speaking, the characters in Evelina may be more memorable than those in Joseph Andrews, partly because we spend more time with them and partly because Frances Burney gives each character a distinct voice. Hear the Captain, for example: 

““Now, do you see,” said he, “as to Lady Howard, I sha’n’t pretend for to enlist her into my service, and so I shall e’en leave her to make it out as well as she can; but as to all you, I expect obedience and submission to orders; I am now upon a hazardous expedition, having undertaken to convoy a crazy vessel to the shore of Mortification; so, d’ye see, if any of you have anything to propose that will forward the enterprise,-why speak and welcome; but if any of you, that are of my chosen crew, capitulate, or enter into any treaty with the enemy,-I shall look upon you as mutinying, and turn you adrift.”” (Vol.1, Letter 33) 

His way of talking is defined by slang and naval terms. 

In the previous blog post, I wrote that Evelina “is indeed full of scenes, dialogue, characters, the novelistic stuff—I would probably say that Evelina is like a bridge between epistolary novels and Jane Austen’s comedies of manners.” 

For a large part of the novel—when Evelina takes over and becomes the narrator, so to speak—the book is more like a comedy of manners in the vein of Jane Austen. But once in a while, such as near the end of Volume 1, Frances Burney does make use of the epistolary form—we see communication and clashing perspectives. 

4/ Certain things in Evelina find echoes in Jane Austen: the men who can’t take no for an answer remind me of Mr Collins; Evelina’s embarrassing relatives make me think of the Bennets; the scene of her and Sir Clement in the chariot find parallels in the scene of Emma and Mr Elton in his carriage; and so on and so forth. 

The most unrealistic part of Evelina and also Richardson’s Pamela is that because of the epistolary form, these girls tell their (real or adoptive) parents everything—have these authors not met teenagers? Jane Austen’s novels don’t have this problem.

Reading Evelina is interesting for various reasons. On the one hand, Frances Burney is very funny and has some of Jane Austen’s qualities—wouldn’t it make more sense for Janeites to read Burney than contemporary writers’ spin-offs? But on the other hand, we can see that Burney laid the ground but Austen went much further—it is no wonder that Jane Austen is considered one of the greatest writers of all time whereas Burney doesn’t get anywhere near the same attention. The characters in Evelina do have a distinct voice but they are largely defined by a single trait, and more importantly, things are as they appear, whereas in Jane Austen, things are often not what they seem—from the very beginning, in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility (I’m excluding the juvenilia), she has explored the question of appearance vs reality. That gives her novels a depth and complexity that one doesn’t quite see in Evelina.

Perhaps I’m being hasty as usual—I’m on Volume 2 out of 3—but Lord Orville is a romantic interest from the start, he and Evelina are attracted to each other right away, the “odious creatures” are odious and I don’t think they are different from what they appear. The question is whether they are capable of surprise, like Shakespeare’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek or Dickens’s Sir Leicester. 

So let’s see.