Novel
Evelina
Fanny Burney · 1778
Opening lines
CAN any thing, my good Sir, be more painful to a friendly mind, than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence? Indeed it is sometimes difficult to determine, whether the relator or the receiver of evil tidings is most to be pitied.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Evelina is seventeen and has grown up in seclusion at Berry Hill, with the Reverend Villars, her guardian. Her mother, who died giving birth to her, had secretly married Sir John Belmont, who burned the marriage certificate and denied the union. Invited to Lady Howard's in Kent, she leaves for London with Mrs Mirvan and her daughter: balls, the opera, the gardens of Ranelagh. At her first ball she dances with Lord Orville, and Sir Clement Willoughby begins to pursue her; a vulgar grandmother returned from France and cousins who are silversmiths in Holborn embarrass her.
Context
At fifteen, the author had burned her manuscripts, among them the story of her heroine's mother, who went on living in her head. Her brother took the novel to the booksellers: Dodsley refused an anonymous work, Lowndes accepted it for twenty pounds. It appeared in January 1778 without any author's name. Her father recognised it and confided the secret to Mrs Thrale; a satirical poem made it public in the autumn. According to witnesses, Johnson found passages in it worthy of Richardson, and Burke stayed up a whole night to finish it.
Who it is for
An epistolary novel, of about four hundred pages in French, which the heroine addresses for the most part to her guardian.
Prizes and reception
Three printings in a year, some fifteen editions with its first bookseller, more than sixty in seven languages during the author's lifetime, and a French translation as early as 1779.
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