Book description
With entries from the diary of Fanny Burney.
'O Sir, how much uneasiness must I suffer, to counterbalance one
short morning of happiness!'
In this comic and sharply incisive satire of excess and
affectations, beautiful young Evelina falls victim to the rakish
advances of Sir Clement Willoughby on her entrance to the world of
fashionable London. Colliding with the manners and customs of a
society she doesn't understand, she finds herself without hope that
she should ever deserve the attention of the man she loves. Frances
Burney's first novel brilliantly sends up eighteenth-century society -
and its opinions of women - while enticingly depicting its delights.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
Frances 'Fanny' Burney (1752-1840) was one of the leading cultural
figures of eighteenth-century London. Her enormously successful novel
Evelina
, written in her mid-twenties, creates a magical picture of the
particularly clever, vigorous and leisured society at whose heart she
stood. First publishing anonymously, her own father did not know that
she was the writer of
Evelina
until its successful reception encouraged her to reveal her secret. One
of the great letter-writers and conversationalists of the period, Burney
was also the author of the novels
Cecilia
and
Camilla
, and was a major influence on Jane Austen.
