Seeing that I’ve attended many of the American Eighteenth-Century Society annual meetings since 1972, it was a great joy to catch up with old and more recent friends the other day in an extraordinary Los Angeles glass tower, and tell them about Fanny Burney and Fanny Price. The field has expanded remarkably since the Society began. That made for an extraordinarily stimulating meeting, so much so that I realised what I needed to say in the Conclusion to “Satire, Celebrity, and Politics and Jane Austen,” came home to New Zealand, and wrote it at top speed. I’ve finished checking the first chapter, and am about to start on the next.
“Jane Austen and the Subscription List to Fanny Burney’s ‘Camilla’ (1796)” appeared in “Persuasions On-line,” 35:1 (Winter, 2014). Here I suggest that the young Jane Austen gathered up subscriptions from friends and family members who were unknown to Burney. Austen, who would often work from Burney in her novels, praised her celebrated senior in a series of remarkable superlatives in “Northanger Abbey,” so why not play the secret patron and help the novel appear?
