Frances Burney and her readers. The negotiated image.

Introduction

1 "Snatching immortality for herself": Construing the

image of the author in Frances Burney's Evelina

Setting the scene

Performing impeccable femininity

Strategy 1: remaining anonymous to ensure unprejudiced reading

Strategy 2: epistolary narrative as a means of construing an innocent

heroine

Strategy 3: construing the heroine's innocence through diegesis and

mimesis

Strategy 4: intertextual contexts as misdirection

Misdirection step 1: establishing the author's superior understanding

and moral backbone through insightful assessments of flawed

femininity

Mrs. Mirvan's weakness

Madame Duval: disgust and fascination with feminine entrails

Mrs. Selwyn: disclaiming the masculine

Misdirection step 2: a comic relief

Conclusions: Burney's Evelina as an illustration of eighteenth-century

cultural sociability

2 Seven Veils cast off?: On the negotiation of the authorial

image in Burney's later novels

Preface as a threshold of authorial image creation

Defence of the novel - Empowering the authorial self

Truth and fiction on the level of plot in The Wanderer

The question of voice: technicalities of narrating a novel
Bakhtin's heteroglossia and Burney's novels

Language in the novel

Conclusion: the dance of the author in Burney's later novels

3 The art of retrograde motion: Frances Burney's Memoirs of

Doctor Charles Burney

Becoming the author of the author of her being, or perfecting the art

of retrograde motion

Factual distortions of "borderline poetics"?

The consummate art of crossing generic borders

Dr. Burney's daughter, Dr. Johnson's heiress

Conclusion: "her father's representative"

Anna Paluchowska-Messing is a faculty member and teaches English Literature at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.