Frances Burney and her readers. The negotiated image.

Anna Paluchowska-Messing is a faculty member and teaches English Literature at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

• Introduction 1 "Snatching immortality for herself": Construing theimage of the author in Frances Burney’s Evelina Setting the scene Performing impeccable femininity Strategy 1: remaining anonymous to ensure unprejudiced reading Strategy 2: epistolary narrative as a means of construing an innocentheroine Strategy 3: construing the heroine’s innocence through diegesis andmimesis Strategy 4: intertextual contexts as misdirection Misdirection step 1: establishing the author’s superior understandingand moral backbone through insightful assessments of flawedfemininity Mrs. Mirvan’s weakness Madame Duval: disgust and fascination with feminine entrails Mrs. Selwyn: disclaiming the masculine Misdirection step 2: a comic relief Conclusions: Burney’s Evelina as an illustration of eighteenth-centurycultural sociability 2 Seven Veils cast off?: On the negotiation of the authorialimage in Burney’s later novels Preface as a threshold of authorial image creation Defence of the novel – Empowering the authorial self Truth and fiction on the level of plot in The Wanderer The question of voice: technicalities of narrating a novel Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and Burney’s novels Language in the novel Conclusion: the dance of the author in Burney’s later novels 3 The art of retrograde motion: Frances Burney’s Memoirs ofDoctor Charles Burney Becoming the author of the author of her being, or perfecting the artof retrograde motion Factual distortions of “borderline poetics”? The consummate art of crossing generic borders Dr. Burney’s daughter, Dr. Johnson’s heiress Conclusion: “her father’s representative” 4 "Her place in public estimate": An (after)word onBurney’s place in the literary canon The tradition of forgetting The path of domestification Other paths temporarily out of bounds “Her place in public estimate”, or “what others may writeabout her” The changing horizons and Burney studies Changing horizons stage 1: forgetting the novelist, assessing thediaris Changing horizons stage 2: political agendas The latest change in the horizons Conclusion Bibliography