Warwick's Reviews > Cecilia

I little thought, when I first picked this book up with a sense more of duty than anticipation, how extraordinarily fun it would prove to be (not least because I managed to convince my wife that ‘Fanny Burney’ was eighteenth-century slang for thrush). For the last week I have been rushing through work in order to enjoy my train-ride home in the company of Cecilia, and going to bed early to get some extra reading time in. Which hasn't happened to me for a while.

My main worry, after the first couple of hundred pages, was that there was still so much of the book left for things to go downhill. And it is true – let's say this up-front – that the ending is the most disappointing part of the novel; the last volume collapses into melodrama and feverish exclamations, and in general resolves the problems of the plot in ways that are bound to be unsatisfactory for a modern reader. But I don't want to let that overshadow the rest of the book too much, because the first seven hundred pages were pure joy for me, which for a book this size is more than anyone had a right to expect.

Cecilia and her love interest are endearing enough, but the real fun comes from the amazing cast of supporting characters, whom Burney sketches as a series of hilarious caricatures. The flighty socialites, proto-gossip-girls, sleazy men and haughty toffs are so recognisable that I found myself dreaming of how this could be remade as a high school movie. Miss Larolles in particular – ‘the inimitable Miss Larolles’, as one of Austen's heroines calls her – is an absolute delight to spend time with, and I could listen to her breathless chatter all day – But only conceive what happened to me! Was that not horrid provoking?, etc.

Much of the enjoyment here comes from the snapshot the book offers of everyday contemporary society. Unlike so many other novelists of the time, who were writing Gothic tales set in exotic France or Italy, Burney is deliberately capturing, in an almost documentary way, the daily life of 1779–80 London, including fashionable events and soirées of the period. There are so many fantastic details in here concerning how people got around, what kind of etiquette was involved in mixed-sex socialising, who handed whom into carriages, how you called on acquaintances, how you made travel arrangements, and so forth. I suppose some people may find this boring, but I was absolutely captivated. There are so many scenes that we can't properly ‘read’: often, someone will say something innocuous which occasions total outrage, while at other times they'll come out with something apparently awful which everyone seems to find perfectly agreeable.

And, surprisingly, through all of this, Burney's focus is very much on what we might now call social justice; rather than the ballrooms and beau monde that I was expecting, there is a consistent effort here to range through different classes of society, and indeed to challenge socio-economic structures in and of themselves. One character, disgusted by the prevailing demands of politeness, points out that ‘The bow is to the coat, the attention is to the rank, and the fear of offending ought to extend to all mankind,’ and this is something that the book tries to explore on a large scale.

Cecilia herself is placed in a position that, for modern readers, can only be seen in pointedly feminist terms: she is an heiress, but can only inherit if her husband agrees to take her surname. (Weirdly, this is something that seems to have been less uncommon then than now.) But the man she loves is from a very old and proud – though not very wealthy – family. The plot therefore takes these ideas of female autonomy, financial muscle, and patriarchal tradition, and clashes them together with extreme violence to see what breaks.

It is customary to see Frances Burney as a sort of John-the-Baptist figure. ‘The whole of this unfortunate business,’ someone exclaims during the dénouement of this one, ‘has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE,’ and one hears the sound of someone frantically taking notes in Bath. I had expected to find that Austen brought wit and skill to a rather hidebound genre, but that's not at all what I feel now. This is every bit as funny as anything in Austen. I see Austen's importance now a bit differently: what she did was, I think, to get rid of the melodramatic silliness that Burney still leant on for her conclusion, and also to find a way to achieve these effects in three hundred rather than nine hundred pages, which is certainly no small achievement.

Even so, there are things in here that you just don't get in Austen. Proper action, for one thing: Cecilia includes such set-pieces as a public suicide in St James's Gardens, which I really was not expecting. And, for another thing, moral ambiguity – there are many characters here who are sympathetic but seriously flawed, and it is very hard to know, on reflection, what we are supposed to think about the way things conclude. The ‘happy ending’, if such it is, is a very ironic one. At first, I thought this was just a problem for modern readers, but it's clear from contemporary reactions that people at the time were disturbed by it as well. The world of Cecilia is, in the end, a disturbing and a dark one, but I absolutely loved spending time there.