Evelina by Frances Burney [Paperback: Good]

Norton Critical Edition paperback in Good condition (487 pages)

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.

Included in this Norton Critical Edition:

• "Contexts and Contemporary Reactions" which illuminates eighteenth-century culture with selections from conduct books for women. 
• Extracts from Burneys letters and journals and five contemporary reviews.
• "Criticism" presents a superb selection of critical writing about the novel.  The critics include Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Hazlitt, John Wilson Croker, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, Joyce Hemlow, Martha G. Brown, Kenneth W. Graham, Kristina Straub, Gina Campbell, Susan Fraiman, and Margaret Anne Doody.
• A Chronology and Selected Bibliography.