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Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782)

by Fanny Burney

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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7461729,859 (3.9)1 / 180
Classic Literature. Fiction. Romance. Historical Fiction. HTML:

Fans of Jane Austen's work will enjoy the novels of her predecessor Fanny Burney, who many critics and historians agree exerted a profound influence over Austen's evolution as a writer. The sweeping novel Cecilia follows one well-born woman's quest to find a suitable husband who will meet the exacting stipulations set forth by her family.

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Content Note: suicide

Plot:
Cecilia grew up rather sheltered with her uncle, the Dean. But he died shortly before she came of age, he died, leaving her in the care of three guardians until she could take care of her own affairs and notably, quite a substantial inheritance. This inheritance hinges on the fact that Cecilia marry a man who will take her name instead of the other way round. The Dean chose her guardians with different things in mind: Mr. Harrel, who married Cecilia’s childhood friend Priscilla, is supposed to be her social net. Mr. Briggs is a self-made man supposed to take care of Cecilia’s money. And Mr. Delvile comes from a very old family and is supposed to give Cecilia access to important connections. Saying good-bye to her fatherly friend Mr. Monckton, Cecilia makes her way to London to stay with the Harrels. But she will soon find out that life as an heiress with three guardians is far from simple.

Cecilia is a rather massive novel and it’s a little more ambiguous than I expected, which might make it a little less accessible than Evelina, but it is an excellent novel: insightful characterizations and satire, as well as criticism of the life of privileged society.

Read more on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2022/07/11/cecilia-or-memoirs-of-an-heiress-frances-burney... ( )
  kalafudra | Jul 11, 2022 |
We need to get a couple of things out of the way before I get to the proper review.

i) This is too long.
ii) This shouldn't be read the way you'd read a Hemingway novel--sitting down and intensely fretting through the intense pages of intensity. This should be read the way you watch a TV series: a few chapters here, a few there, letting the various plots lines wrap themselves up, taking a pause while the next one gets going, all the while keeping in mind that there is an overarching point to the thing, but not expecting that overarching point to be the focus of every chapter, let alone every sentence.

Now, having said all that, this is fabulous stuff. Burney gives you exactly what you want from a late eighteenth century novel: heart-rending sentiment, burning satire, and intelligent sociology. The characters are well drawn, and don't 'develop,' because they are people, not characters in a fiction-writing workshop, and people don't develop like that. But they do get entangled in plot, and that's what Burney gives us: incident after incident, all leading us towards a crisis point, whether local (as when Cecilia finally moves out of her first guardian's house) or more general (as at the end of the novel).

Mr. Gosport is an interesting innovation, if you're interested in that kind of thing--he's the intelligent voice of the novel, but he's not particularly involved in anything. In fact, he's really there to let Burney write satirical, sociological essays about the upper class, and they are wonderful things, perhaps the best parts of the book.

Burney was well known to Austen ('Pride and Prejudice' is a phrase from this very book), and that might have skewed some readers' expectations for the worse. Austen is a wonderful novelist, who made genuine advances in the art, but Burney was working in a very different form, from a very different perspective. It's best to know this before diving into this monster of a book; this is not Our Jane. But if you give up looking for Austen, you're likely to find any number of other novelists in there: the Delviles feel like something from late James, for instance, and Mr. Monckton would find himself quite at home in a Trollope novel.

In short, then, Burney was a writer of genius, who had the misfortune to write just before another writer, with a very different genius, changed our expectations of the novel, so that Burney can now feel excessive and even unartistic. But there are real rewards to reading Cecilia. ( )
  stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
Cecilia Beverly is a young orphan whose relatives left her with a large fortune, three quarelling trustees, and a mind of unsurpassed delicacy and gentility. The first volume is set during the tumultuous time Cecilia spent with one trustee, who "borrows" huge sums of money from her and eventually kills himself to avoid his debts. Cecilia moves back the country, but her Love Interest, a man of good character but very proud parents, follows her there and begs her to marry him. ALAS! According to her uncle's will, whoever marries Cecilia must either take her surname or relinquish her vast fortune. Since neither is acceptable to either Cecilia or the man who is supposedly desperately in love with her, they languish apart for a year or so. Eventually, the Love Interest's mother agrees to allow a secret marriage, and in exchange Cecilia will give up all her money. Cecilia agrees, they are married in the most hurried, unexciting ceremony in literary history (it takes less than a paragraph to describe the entire wedding of two characters who have spent ~900 pages pining for each other), and then Love Interest gallops off to France. (He'd shot a man, again described singularly bloodlessly, and needed to escape the law.) Love Interest returns, accuses Cecilia of betraying him, Cecilia goes mad, Love Interest feels guilty, Love Interest's proud parents feel guilty, Cecilia magically regains her senses and everyone forgives each other. Cecilia and Love Interest live happily ever after, especially after another relative, never before mentioned, decides to give them a fortune to replace the one Cecilia gave up.

This was an infuriating book. Entire plots are forgotten about (what about the lawsuit against Cecilia? Doesn't Love Interest ever get in trouble for shooting Monckton?) and a dozen characters exist only to provide "comic" relief and cautionary tales. Cecilia and Devile are witty characters with a wealth of common sense until they fall in love, at which point the book rapidly devolves into a laughable melodrama.

Here's a randomly chosen sample of Burney's style, complete with sixteen commas in a single sentence: "As she was no longer, as hitherto, repairing to a temporary habitation, which at pleasure she might quit, and to which, at a certain period, she could have no possible claim, but to a house which was her own for ever, or, at least, could solely by her own choice be transferred, she determined, as much as was in her power, in quitting her desultory dwellings, to empty her mind of the transactions which had passed in them, and upon entering a house where she was permanently to reside, to make the expulsion of her past sorrows, the basis upon which to establish her future serenity." Holy crap. ( )
  wealhtheowwylfing | Feb 29, 2016 |
I had sort of a love/hate relationship with this book. Published in 1782, this is a novel of sensibility, following the young adulthood of Cecilia, an heiress to a large fortune who is also benevolent, honest, and good. A condition of her inheritance is that her future spouse take her last name upon marrying her which will prove to cause all sorts of trouble for the one man she desires to marry out of the many suitors vying for her attention.

Cecilia also is left by her Uncle (who had been caring for her after her parents died) with three guardians, none of whom was chosen very wisely. One is a gambler living well beyond his means who will effectively rob Cecilia of part of her fortune, one is a miserly man with no social skills, and one is affected by his excessive pride in his family name.

As a novel of sensibility, there are long scenes in this book of excessive emotion and drama with long-winded speeches where honestly I wished things would just move along already. But there are also several characters who exhibit realistic personalities, showing shades of both good and bad traits. Cecilia herself surprised me, because though she is good through and through, she does "have a spine" and I ended up really liking her and rooting for her as she matured throughout the book.

Overall, I'm very glad I read this and I enjoyed it though it will not rank among my favorites because the over-dramatic nature and wordiness just don't suit my personal taste. I much preferred Burney's [Evelina] which I found had a charming nature that I personally enjoyed more. ( )
  japaul22 | Dec 13, 2015 |
Cecilia is a young heiress to a massive fortune. But there’s a catch: a large part of her inheritance is contingent on retaining her surname after marriage. And of course, this just wasn’t done in the 1780s, when this book was published. Nor was Cecilia allowed to live an independent life. Her uncle’s will appointed three guardians to manage her affairs, and even though just a few months remain before she turns 21, Cecilia is very much subject to their control. One guardian, Mr Harrel, is the husband of a dear childhood friend, and Cecilia goes to live with them. Her initial delight at being reunited with her friend quickly turns to shock and sadness, when she sees how the Harrels live beyond their means. Cecilia, being both good-natured and naive, tries to help, but her generosity goes unrewarded.

Meanwhile, several men are vying for Cecilia’s favor, and as flattering as that may seem most of them are motivated by nothing more than improving their social standing through increased wealth. Cecilia’s “journey” through this novel essentially involves learning that people who appear to have good intentions, even those you have loved or trusted for years, have a dark side especially where money is concerned. Just one man stands out as more noble, and more sincere in his affections, but (no surprise) his family is opposed to him marrying below their social class.

Cecilia inspired Jane Austen; in fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” was first used here in a similar situation. The book is quite long, with many winding subplots and some over-the-top drama, but it is fairly easy reading and an interesting portrait of women at this time in history. ( )
  lauralkeet | Dec 9, 2015 |
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» Add other authors (5 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Burney, Fannyprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Doody, Margaret AnneIntroductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Sabor, PeterEditorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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"Peace to the spirits of my honoured parents, respected be their remains, and immortalized their virtues! may time, while it moulders their frail relicks to dust, commit to tradition the record of their goodness; and Oh may their orphan-descendant be influenced through life by the remembrance of their purity, and in death be solaced, that by her it was unsullied!"
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Classic Literature. Fiction. Romance. Historical Fiction. HTML:

Fans of Jane Austen's work will enjoy the novels of her predecessor Fanny Burney, who many critics and historians agree exerted a profound influence over Austen's evolution as a writer. The sweeping novel Cecilia follows one well-born woman's quest to find a suitable husband who will meet the exacting stipulations set forth by her family.

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From the back cover: "'How vastly odious this new father of yours is!' said Lady Honoria, in a whisper to Cecilia; 'what could ever induce you to give up your charming estate for the sake of coming into his fusty old family!'"

Cecilia is an heiress and an orphan. Elegant in form and liberal of heart, she enters her twenty-first year with every advantage, but no guiding hand. There is one condition attached to Cecilia's inheritance: if she marries, the man of her choice must take her name. Then Cecilia falls in love with a passionate aristocrat, Mortimer Delvile, and as so often happens, the course of true love fails to run smooth. For Mortimer's parents, as "the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE", refuse to countenance the exchange of Cecilia's wealth for their ancient family name. First published in 1782, this, Fanny Burney's second novel, has been out of print for over seventy years. Entertaining and absorbing, it provided Jane Austen with more than just the title for her novel, Pride and Prejudice.
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