Customer Reviews

Cecilia

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Oh what a treat! Don't be dismayed by the length, this is delightful! Unlike most authors of long fiction, Burney actually manages to stay on task and not wander into thoughts of war and whatever. This book is 941 pages because 941 pages of things happen. This is the story of Cecilia, a young heiress from the country. When her family dies she is left with three guardians: the proud Mr. Delvile, the miserly Mr. Briggs, and the husband of her childhood friend, Mr. Harrel. She moves in with the Harrels and is escorted into the London high life - parties, visiting, the opera, and scores of gentleman anxious to make the acquaintence of a beautiful heiress. Cecilia is not impressed. The commentary on 18th Century London life is scathing - and remarkably apropos to modern life as well.

One night at a masquerade ball she is saved from the devil, or a partier dressed as such, by a charming man in a domino, the first real person Cecilia has met. He knows who she is, where she comes from, and who her guardians are, but Cecilia cannot even discover his name. At the end of the evening he disappears, but the seeds of love are planted - if only Cecilia knew who he was! Thoughts of her new acquaintence are interrupted though, as she realizes that the Harrels are quickly going in to more debt than they will every be able to pay off, and their party train is not slowing down for the emminent crash to come.

The most amazing thing about this book is how modern it is. Though set in the late 18th century, the problems and scenarios transfer easily into our modern conscious. One of the central issues in the novel is that Cecilia will lose her inheritance if whoever she marries does not take her last name. Have we as a society yet gotten over this? Not by a long shot. The descriptions of the different characters are as funny as they are scathing - yet these gossips, fortune-hunters, scatter-brains, and denialists still fill our world today (I'm the scatter-brain). As the book progresses it moves more from satire and into soap opera (hence my final decision to give it 4 not 5 stars). It becomes less intelligent, but no less engaging as a roller coaster of twists and turns are thrown in the path of Cecilia and her desire for her one true love.

It is a known fact that novelist Jane Austen looked upon Frances Burney for inspiration. Austen must have recognized the genius of this late-18th Century female writer, and whether or not she ever matched Burney's multi-faceted quality is still an open question.

On the surface, this is the tale of Miss Cecilia Beverley, a young, beautiful and wealthy heiress looking for the suitable match - hardly an original theme. But under this veil, there is the dramatic genius of a novelist whose characters impersonate the virtues and vices of her time in vivid tones much more reminiscent of Dickens than of Austen.

Miss Beverley's path to love and marriage winds its way through a series of circumstances, most of which are engendered by her agenda-driven acquaintances, guardians, friends and false-friends. From a dramatic perspective, the pace is quick, and the reader's emotions are immediately engaged for Cecilia - a fresh yet not prudish heroine whose temperate virtues never degenerate into the caricaturesque. Will she find love, or will she succumb to the many traps laid before her? The reader will find many good twists in this regard!

An acute observer of human nature, Burney populates her novel with personality-types that are as current today as they were then - from the regretful young man who married into money in a haste to the empty-headed socialite with more wealth than sense. However, the author never presents these characters from a moralizing position - and her implied judgment of some of the characters never borders on the proselytizing. Drama is always kept alive by highly dynamic scenes (I don't want to give anything away, but I assure you that they are good) and by lots of tension between characters.

The daughter of a famed musicologist, Dr. Burney, the author manages to weave the thread of her own views on aesthetics, which she does tastefully and unintrusively adding a wonderful dimension to the story. At times you feel like you are sitting at a fashionable dinner-table hearing duscussions about the relative merits of Handel's music versus Italian opera.

In all, this remains one of my favorite novels. Although the book is relatively long, the good writing, captivating plot and the tasty character-studies make the read quick and intense. Also, Burney never indulges in lengthy descriptions, off-stage scenes or other tracts that would otherwise slow down the good pace of the story for the modern reader. As a matter of fact, I loved this book and its author so much that I purchased the original 1781 edition.

As an interesting aside, Frances Burney's biography makes in itself an interesting novel. She grew up in a culturally-fertile environment, became and expatriate who married a Frenchman in the height of the trouble-years between England and France, and survived a mastectomy without anesthetic to live well into her eighties.

Why she is not better known as an author and a great personality remains a mystery to me.

Why isn't Fanny Burney famous? That's exactly what I began to wonder after a friend convinced me that I should read Evelina. I thought I hated 18th century literature based on the class I took on it in college--if only we had read Fanny Burney then!
She writes with wit and style--it's easy to see why Jane Austen admired her so much! Even though this book is very lengthy, it is not possible to get bored reading it, and although times have changed a lot since Fanny Burney's time, the book still seems alive and relevant to modern readers as many of the unfortunate realities of society that Cecilia struggles with are still with us today in different forms. The characters in this novel are so real you will feel like you know them by the end of the book. Some of the chapters are so funny you will find yourself laughing out loud! I think Fanny Burney deserves to be much more famous. It would be wonderful if someone would make a film of this novel to help spread the word that Fanny Burney's books are great reading!

This was truely an enjoyable reading experience. Surprisingly for a book of this time period, it got off right away to a super start and just got better as the pages turned. Burney's ability with the English language was well beyond imressive, it was stunning. She quickly developed an inspired set of characters interacting with one another in delightful scenes. The masquerade ball was hilarious. I heartily recommend this outstanding piece of literature.

How many readers know that Jane Austen's title "Pride and Prejudice" is actually a quotation from Fanny Burney's "Cecilia"? Perhaps Austen even meant her readers to read her novel in the light of the earlier one. "Cecilia" is interesting, a novel about a man and woman both of whom need to unbend to come together. It reflects well the interest in moral and psychological intensity in its time and helps dispel the notion that women writers were not taken seriously in their time. This is a once-a-decade read but well worth the effort.

Any 18th century novel of manners can make Emily Post seem coarse and rude. The heroine of this novel so high minded and refined that she can only go from a bad situation to a worse one. It was, for this reason, a bit painful to read. This novel is 941 pages long, but it is not boring. The author is a master of the form and can sustain the reader. As an 18th century novel, it is full of information on the way people lived in those days. The author, Frances Burney, has a gift with prose styles and dialects, so that one could easily imagine how people spoke and gestured to each other. Cecilia is a hopeful love story of a young heiress who risks everything for love. The novel resembles the style of novel Jane Austen wrote, but is much more complex and displays much more learning and worldliness because its author, Frances Burney, was much more worldly and learned than Jane Austen. It is too bad that this author is not better known.

My mom bought this book at a garage sale for very cheap once almost as a joke, because it was so long. I made several attempts to start reading it, all of which failed, until I finally managed to get stuck in. Then I read it fanatically to the end. It was thrilling! All those amazingly overdrawn characters, how about the "parsimonious" Mr Briggs, not to mention the confusing Mrs Delvile (I imagine it's pronounced "Delville"?

It's all very melodramatic, with an attempted suicide, a real suicide, a carriage-crash (or whatever they called them), and the heroine even goes mad at one point (I thought that was completely unlikely - she'd seemed fairly sane before that)! Who said ladies in the old days spent all their time doing embroidery?

One really got a sense of pity toward the poor girl - I thought the whole point of the novel was that she was surrounded by all these very different charcters, none of whom actually seemed to dislikeher, and yet she had absolutely no-one to trust or rely on - she was completely alone in the world (maybe it isn't so surprising she went mad).

All in all a 'corking good read.' You forget the length when you really get into it.

I read this novel some 6-7 years ago, after I read Evelina and simply loved it. I loved Cecilia even more. It is true that it is a very long novel but it is very much worth your time. It is about an heiress who will inherit a large amount of money on the condition that the man who marries her will take her surname. She is put under the care of three different people, who represent three different characters. One is a miser, the other is a spendthrift and the third one is: well I don't actually remember the third one. But her emotions regarding the man she is in love with but cannot marry because his proud family will never consent to let him drop his surname,the pain they both feel ... Very very good novel. I couldn't keep from crying in the end.

This is my favorite of Burney's works, because the heroine has a mind of her own, and Burney doesn't insist that we feel sorry for her the entire novel.

(Caviat: Ok, so I have to confess that I am a Burney specialist, so I am a little biased, but only because she's the reason I'm an eighteenth-century scholar!)

When Burney turned to writing her second novel, /Cecilia/ (1782), after her blockbuster success with the light-hearted and thoroughly enjoyable /Evelina/ (1778), and after a severe upset when her father instructed her not to produce her play, /The Witlings/, which bears similar plots and characters to /Cecilia/, she admitted to her sister, Susanna, that she was afraid of writing another novel and enjoying less success. While /Cecilia/ is infinitely more complex and three times as long as /Evelina/, it became a staple of eighteenth-century novels, especially by women. Writers like Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen would write successful novels (Austen's /Pride and Prejudice/ being the most successful) that in many ways responded to the novelistic tradition set down by Burney in /Cecilia/--it's actually really funny to read contemporary reviews of their work, especially because so many reviewers would say something to the effect of, "it's a great novel, but it's not as good as /Cecilia/." Austen alone escaped this critique.

/Cecilia/ is an extraordinary novel not only in its breadth but also in the subject matter Burney takes up: obsessed in almost every novel with suicide, she delves into the emotional and cultural terror of public spaces, private vices, and the dissipation of all ranks of society once again, especially in a climactic scene at Vauxhall, which Johnson famously told her was "exceedingly well-done." The masquerade sequence, too, is utterly delightful and vexing. And while masquerade scenes are by no means rare in eighteenth-century literature, Burney brings to it that archness of wit and vivacity that is particular only to her style of prose. What's even more fascinating is the fact that you get in /Cecilia/ a representation of complete failure and utter inefficacy of patriarchal figures--three inept guardians, and a hero who, while lovable, lives up to his name--Mortimer is always "mortified"--even as Cecilia is required to submit and adhere to the patriarchal regulations of English society.

Cecilia, too, is a unique heroine in the sense that the narrative reveals her interior desires and fantasies of the future with Delvile before she hears a declaration by him--something rather different than her other novels, in which heroines indirectly express their desires or attempt to cover them up before hearing a declaration. Moreover, she does some pretty outrageous things, like consenting, though under duress, to a secret marriage and pursuing her husband at night alone on the streets of London--the acute anxiety and intense emotions of these scenes are executed with brilliance and verve by Burney. It's an exciting novel, and you never feel as though you're reading 900 pages--in fact, I am always sorry when it's over!

A couple eighteenth-centuryisms may deter a reader not particularly interested in the field or in literary studies in general...while Burney is entertaining for any sort of reader, in my opinion, there are a few things about the time period that to a reader unfamiliar with the style would make her work seem maudlin or "unrealistic": the florid language, the play between bursts of passion/emotion and intense "English" restraint and forbearance, the staged manners, and the ceaseless pursuit and torments of the heroine by other men in the novel would seem over-dramatic and "fake" to some, but they are staples of the period. If you enjoy Burney and want to read some other great novelists who take up similar strains, I'd recommend Elizabeth Inchbald's /A Simple Story/ (1791), Charlotte Smith's /Emmeline/ (1788), Ann Radcliffe's /The Italian/ (1797), and Maria Edgeworth's /Belinda/ (1801). Burney's /The Wanderer/ (1814), a close, close second to /Cecilia/ in my opinion, is also a fantastic novel, although the heightened sensibility to terror and the vexed question of "liberty" mark it as a novel of the French Revolution. Though published in 1814, at the same time as Austen's /Mansfield Park/, Burney wrote quite a bit of the novel during the late 1790s, early 1800s, after experiencing life in France with her husband, D'Arblay, a French aristocratic emigre--Burney experienced first-hand the political and social terror and unrest in both Britain and France caused by the Revolution and Reign of Terror. It's a little more outrageous, therefore, than /Cecilia/, but equally entertaining and fascinating!