Woman As ‘Nobody’ and the Novels of Fanny Burney

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pp. 169, ” Burney, considered Jane Austen’s literary mother, shaped both the tradition of women novelists and the novel of manners. Cutting-Gray devotes a chapter to a postmodern reading of each of the novels. In Evelina she explores the ways in which Evelina conceals her sexual and verbal power; in Cecilia and Camilla outbursts of feeling register as hysteria and madness to a patriarchal culture. Burney’s growing concern with female namelessness becomes explicit in The Wanderer, a novel about a woman who refuses to name herself. Cutting-Gray analyzes this novel’s central figure, “Incognita,” rendering a playful figure of speech into a philosophical thesis about the identity of women. By the close of the book, “Nobody” replaces “author” and converts the entity “Fanny Burney” into a multivoiced community. “