On November 4, 2021, Doc Chatters read between the lines of the manuscripts of one 18th-century female novelist. 

A weekly series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs an NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode Thirty-Seven, Carolyn Vega, curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg  Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, and Hilary Havens, Associate Professor at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, explored the manuscripts of English novelist Frances Burney, analyzing her practice of textual recycling and recovering sensational passages from the manuscript of her popular novel Cecilia.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode.

Episode Thirty-Seven: Primary Sources

Carolyn and Hilary examined the following documents: 

Episode Thirty-Seven: Readings and Resources

Frances Burney, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, edited by Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford World's Classics, 1988). An updated edition, edited by Hilary Havens, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. 

Hilary Havens, “Revisions and Revelations in Frances Burney’s Cecilia Manuscript” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 55: 3 (Summer 2015), 537-558. 

Peter Sabor, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney (Cambridge University Press, 2007). 

Catherine M. Parisian, Frances Burney's Cecilia: A Publishing History (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016). 

Biography of Frances Burney (1752-1840) from The Burney Centre at McGill University, which brings together archival material on the Burney family from around the world. Its holdings include microfilm, photocopies, and scans of the major Burney collections at the Berg Collection of The New York Public Library, the British Library and the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

The Burney Society honors Frances Burney d'Arblay (1752-1840), a woman who recorded everything from Johnsonian wit to George III's fits, from Evelina's entrance into the world to Napoleon's last stand. Her acute observations about her family, friends, and 18th-century society show us how much, and how little, life and literature have changed in two centuries.

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