Frances Burney: A Houstory

Abstract

This article maps Frances Burney’s life and works from the vantage point of material studies, considering the houses the author lived, sojourned, and worked in. The tension between the contending discourses of “public” house and “private” house—the house as a space for entertainment and a cultural hub used to promote visibility and augment cultural capital, as opposed to the “private” house as the locus of intimacy and family life—is exemplified by the juxtaposition between the houses Frances Burney lived in as her father’s daughter (in particular the famous house at 35 St. Martin’s Street, London) and the idyllic Surrey dwellings Burney moved into with her husband, Alexandre d’Arblay, after 1793. This article will consider the symbolic, often mythopoetic value associated with Burney’s houses as artificial, cultural mythoi and her poetics of indirect, oblique association to accrue cultural and social capital.