Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress
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Published in 1782, Frances Burney’s Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress follows Cecilia Beverley, a young woman whose substantial inheritance comes with a troubling condition: her future husband must adopt her family name. As she enters London society under the supervision of three imperfect guardians, Cecilia encounters fortune hunters, social pretenders and competing ideas of duty, affection and respectability. Her growing attachment to Mortimer Delvile is complicated by family pride and the conventions governing property, marriage and female independence.
Burney uses the intricate machinery of the eighteenth-century social novel to examine the price women pay for wealth and status in a world where financial security rarely guarantees personal freedom. Her keen ear for dialogue and her gift for exposing vanity make fashionable society both entertaining and morally revealing. Admired by Jane Austen, Cecilia is a major achievement in the development of the English novel, and its sustained scrutiny of inheritance, identity and marriage illuminates the social structures that shaped women’s lives in the Georgian period.
From the book
“The whole of this unfortunate business has been occasioned by the name.”
— Frances Burney, Cecilia
On Cecilia
“The first full-length novel by a woman to deal with the manners of contemporary society.”
— Encyclopaedia Britannica