Evelina

As an avid fan of Austen, I felt compelled to read this 18th century novel, since it is considered to have inspired her works. The affected mannerisms & expressions of the characters felt tiresome & the action frequently appeared to stall, so that I almost abandoned the book, but I persevered to the end, & those final chapters contained many components synonymous with Jane Austen's books.Pleased to have read Evelina & highly unlikely to repeat the experience.

A great read for any Jane Austen fan, as the author was one of her favourites. Makes you really understand how original Jane Austen was compared to other female authors of her time, a notion that is lost most of the time given her status as a classic.

Bought for a university course and will continue to finish the book, very interesting to read

'Evelina' is written in the form of letters, exchanged between a seventeen-year-old girl on her first venture into the great world, to her guardian, Reverend Villiers of Berry Hill. This was not an uncommon way of writing novels in those days; Jane Austen wrote her first novel, 'Love and Friendship', in the form of letters between 1783 and 1790. One of the first epistolary novels was 'Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister' (yes, it's every bit as bad as it sounds) written by Aphra Behn in the 1680s. 'Evelina' bears some minor resemblances to this, and other earlier novels, like those by Samuel Richardson, but is, in many ways, a very new and different sort of book than had ever been written before.The most important aspect of 'Evelina', is its incredible realism. Unfortunately considered long-winded and cumbersome by today's standards, 'Evelina' was revolutionary in its day. Over a period of seven months, the letters meticulously describe a world that is completely alien to us today. Though the eyes of the heroine, we see London, hot, dirty...but terribly exciting. There are balls to visit, gardens, Cox's Museum, which was an array of elaborate mechanical devices. Evelina writes, "They tell me that London is now in full splendour. Two playhouses are open, - the Opera-house, - Ranelagh, - and the Pantheon. - You see I have learned all their names." When she goes to visit them, we find out first-hand, what it's like to sit in an 18th century box and watch an 18th century opera.And of course, no period romance would be complete without balls, and Evelina goes to her share of them and has her share of misunderstandings when she accidentally breaks the social codes; "[she is] A poor weak girl!" Lord Orville remarks when asked his first impression of her. In this way, at least, 'Evelina' isn't quite accessible to the modern reader. Frances Burney was writing for her time; she didn't realize that two hundred years after the fact, people would still be reading her book. There are many things taken for granted that her readers would have known, such as realizing the full import (or the impossibility) of an Earl proposing marriage to seemingly penniless (and possibly illegitimate) young girl; this doesn't detract from the story...it's all the more interesting for learning about how different it was to live then.On the other hand, 'Evelina' is a very modern book. We still feel the emotions they felt then and are delighted by the same things. Not only are the circumstances surprisingly easy to relate to, but the language is modern. Contractions are scattered liberally through the dialog and Miss Burney's ease at writing dialect marks her as a fore-runner of Charles Dickens. Many expressions which we still use today are scattered throughout 'Evelina', such as `in a huff', `sick of it', `the man in the moon', `putting in one's oar', `point-blank', `changing with the tide' and `thing-em-bob'. Even some of our prejudices can be dispelled; women might not have had the vote in 1778, but they had a voice. Mrs. Selwyn, an independent woman with a large fortune, regularly runs rings around the men with her wit and intelligence. As Mrs. Selwyn says, "Come, gentlemen...why do you hesitate? I am sure you cannot be afraid of a weak woman?"We all know Shakespeare had wit, but so did Fanny Burney. I don't think any of Jane Austen's books are as laughter-inducing as 'Evelina'. Partly because she was so young and partly because she had a natural turn for humor, Frances Burney often turned serious moments into comedy. There's a pre-planned hold-up and mugging of Evelina's pretend-French grandmother by pretend-highway bandits and Sir Clement Willoughby, Burney's hilarious and good-natured villain, is always ready to be amusing. Even the near-perfect hero, Lord Orville, on closer inspection, becomes a flawed, but humorous and kind-hearted character.Frances Burney went on to write other books, but the spontaneity and light-heartedness of 'Evelina' set it apart. Yes, it deeply influenced Jane Austen and her much more famous books, but 'Evelina' can stand very well on its own two feet. It marked a turning of the tide, the opening of the door to a genre that we still can't get enough of. It is tragic, then, that 'Evelina', and its author, are not better known. They deserve to be.

What an utterly remarkable book! It is was published in 1778 and is a milestone in the development of the novel. I didn't think the device of using Evelina's letters to tell the story really works. The letters in reply to Evelina were so short and so largely irrelevant to the development of the story that the correspondence sometimes seemed contrived and artificial, and on occasion I couldn't imagine how Evelina found the time to write her letters. However, if the novel form barely exists then I guess Frances Burney had to reveal Evelina's thoughts in a way that would seem plausible and familiar to the readers of the time.I enjoyed the book most for its description of genteel society in the 1770s, and how startlingly different this was from what Jane Austen portrayed half a century later. Most of the characters who appear are so selfish and self absorbed, so rude and unpleasant, and so utterly predatory that it suggets that the polite conversation and manners portayed by Jane Austen was no more than a set of stock phrases and gestures that had been learned for occasional use. It always seemed to me that Jane Austen's characters could perfectly well express themselves within those conventions, but in Evelina only the cardboard superhero Lord Orville is able to do that, and only later in the novel do we come across Mrs Selwyn to represent the self-confident and erudite women so beloved by Jane. Beyond that we find Evelina and most of the young women she meets to have few choices about what they are permitted to do or say, mere toys of the men they meet and the imperious older women of their circle.I had always thought that Jane Austen was describing a world that really did exist, at least for some, but Frances Burney made me wonder whether that later description was largely imaginary, a device to flatter her readers that they did possess a deeply embedded and admirable gentility rather than just a paper thin assemblage of phrases and conventions. It could of course all have changed in the time between Frances Burney and Jane Austen but I doubt it. I found the world that Frances Burney created for Evelina, in truth the world we see in Hogarth's satirical prints, much more convincing.