“Obscure Be Still the Unsuccessful Muse”: Frances Burney and the Arts

Abstract

Francesca Saggini introduces this collection of essays by leading scholars in Burney studies and provides an interdisciplinary critical consideration of the relationship of one of the major authors of the long English Romanticism with the arts. The encounter, Saggini claims, was not devoid of tensions and indeed often required a degree of wrangling on Burney’s part. As evidenced by its complex biographical implications, this was a revealing and at times contentious dialogue, allowing us to reconstruct in an original and highly focused way the feminine negotiation with such key concepts of the late Enlightenment and Romanticism as virtue, reputation, creativity, originality, artistic expression, and self-construction. Saggini underlines the interconnections between mutually reinforcing forms of neighbouring artistic activities as components of a broader spectrum of interartistic and intermedial cultural signification, pivotal to contextualize and reassess Frances Burney’s work.