Frances’s Fanny and MP Films

Frances Burney by Edward Francesco Burney (c. 1784-85)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve put up the first new documents onto my website since my husband died, two to be precise:

Frances’s Fanny: a proposal for the Burney society AGM which will occur just before the JASNA, and at Montreal too, one I developed when I was writing a review of Volume 5 of the Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 1782-83, ed. Lars Troide, Stewart Cooke: Frances’s Fanny where I propose to develop my idea that Frances performed a character in an on-going novel first for the benefit of herself, Susan Burney Phillips, and her second father, Mr Crisp; and as these deeply congenial interlocutors were taken by death, for herself, her husband, her other sisters, friends and father. She rewrote and added to it over the years, and after the publication by her great-great niece of her diaries and journals (6 volumes, 1842) set up as a multiple volume novel, the character she partly invented so endeared herself to her audience, she came to be identified with as the chief characters of Burney’s novels, especially Evelina;

Mansfield Park at the Movies: the rejected proposal I’ve talked too much about: what the four MP film adaptations have to tell us about Austen’s novel and one another.

Fanny Price’s first sight of the building as she rides up in a carriage next to Mrs Norris (1983 Mansfield Park, scripted Ken Taylor)

Totally by myself in a new configuration it took me a mere 2 hours. I hope to be quicker about this sort of thing next time.

Ellen