1360499 CECILIA, OR MEMOIRS OF AN HEIRESS. Frances Burney.
CECILIA, OR MEMOIRS OF AN HEIRESS
CECILIA, OR MEMOIRS OF AN HEIRESS
CECILIA, OR MEMOIRS OF AN HEIRESS
CECILIA, OR MEMOIRS OF AN HEIRESS
CECILIA, OR MEMOIRS OF AN HEIRESS
CECILIA, OR MEMOIRS OF AN HEIRESS
CECILIA, OR MEMOIRS OF AN HEIRESS
CECILIA, OR MEMOIRS OF AN HEIRESS

CECILIA, OR MEMOIRS OF AN HEIRESS

London: T. Payne and Son, 1782. First Edition. 12mo, [2], 3-239 pp (Vol. 1); 3-263 pp (Vol. 2); 3-365 pp (Vol. 3); 3-328 pp (Vol. 4); 3-398 pp (Vol. 5). Good+; bound in contemporary marbled paper with 1/2 calf, black spine labels with gilt titling, misspelt "Cecelia," all labels present but some with pieces torn away, slight rubbing and fading to paper covers and shelf wear to spine edges and corners; bindings tight; text blocks age toned but clean; some foxing to pages throughout; previous owner name in ink on ffeps "J. Richards."

1360499

Shelved Dupont Bookstore

Price: $2,250

NOTES

Frances Burney (1752 – 1840), also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. From 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded. Most of her plays were not performed in her lifetime. (via Wikipedia)

Austen was an avid reader of Burney's works, and referred to them several times in her letters to friends and family. She praises them fervently in her so-called "Defense of the Novel" in Northanger Abbey:

"And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."

Though Austen's second published novel was originally entitled First Impressions, it has been suggested that this passage in the final chapter of Cecilia inspired her to change it:

“The whole of this unfortunate business,” said Dr Lyster, “has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. Your uncle, the Dean, began it, by his arbitrary will, as if an ordinance of his own could arrest the course of nature! and as if he had power to keep alive, by the loan of a name, a family in the male branch already extinct. Your father, Mr Mortimer, continued it with the same self-partiality, preferring the wretched gratification of tickling his ear with a favourite sound, to the solid happiness of his son with a rich and deserving wife. Yet this, however, remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination..." [emphasis the author's]

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