Evelina
Evelina
Author: Frances Burney
Desc: Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid satirical and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society womanhood and inevitably love Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens theatre visits and balls. But Evelina's innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions--as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville. Evelina comic and shrewd is at once a guide to fashionable London a satirical attack on the new consumerism an investigation of women's position in the late eighteenth century and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader.