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Author Biography

Lorna Clark, Department of English, Carleton University, has a teaching certificate from Bell Education Trust in Cambridge and has held teaching posts or visiting fellowships at several universities in Canada and Australia. She has written course materials for students in the outback, has contributed to the MLA series on teaching, and has taught a variety of classes: on writing or scriptwriting, prose fiction, and British literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth centuries. She specialises in the field of early English women writers, in which she has published widely, with a special focus on the Burney family on whom she has published several scholarly editions, and edited two collections of essays. She was invited to devise her own course in her field of expertise which has inspired the essay in this volume.

Abstract

This essay outlines a stand-alone course on Frances Burney, suggesting that she offers a good entry point into eighteenth-century studies. Given that she wrote in so many genres—novels, plays, journals, and letters—such a course avoids the narrowness which often marks a single author course. In twelve weeks, the course studied ten works: four novels, five plays (three comedies and two tragedies) and a selection of journals and letters. The latter describes well-known figures in Burney’s social and literary networks in eighteenth-century London and leads to discussion of techniques of the epistolary, of diary-writing and of women’s life-writing. Burney’s novels are well known: her first is written in the manners tradition of Austen, and her last during the Romantic period so her work embodies the transition between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. Her plays are less well known; while the tragedies are somewhat inaccessible to modern taste, Burney’s comedies are appealing for their quick pace and humour.

 

The essay outlines the course design, assignments, and classroom practices used to encourage student engagement, including weekly responses, student-led seminars, and research projects grounded in Burney criticism. Analysis of seminar discussions and student essays reveals strong interest in themes such as gender politics, female education, theatricality, and the representation of women’s oppression, with enthusiasm for Burney’s journals, comic drama and early fiction. Although some later works proved challenging for modern readers, students recognized Burney as an important writer and commentator on eighteenth-century society. The course demonstrates that studying Burney in depth not only helps to broaden understanding of the eighteenth-century literary culture, but also raises interesting questions about genre, authorship, and canon formation. This course affirms the importance of the rediscovery of early women writers and their relevance to later generations of readers.

Keywords

Frances Burney, early English women writers, gender studies, women’s education, eighteenth-century fiction, Romantic novel, eighteenth-century drama, British literature, women’s life-writing, teaching eighteenth-century studies

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