Language In Clarissa, Evelina And Pride And Prejudice

the eighteenth century. Virtuous daughters did not claim
authorship, a form of authority, in a male realm.
Virtuous daughters submitted to male authority, giving
even their names and their identity over to the name and
the identity of their husbands. Daughters submitted to
male authority by trading one patrilineal name for
another. Even by using her father's surname, Frances
Burney would be treading over the line of authority had
she published without her father's permission. Susan
Greenfield illustrates Burney's ambivalence over
authorship through Burney' s hesitation to let her father,
Charles Burney, know that she had published Evelina.
Greenfield tells us that Burney's dedication suggests,
"that at the time of Evelinaf s publication, namelessness
also had personal significanceff (304).
Burney, mother and guardian of her earlier youthful
creation, burned the History of Caroline Evelyn, spurred
by the disparaging remarks of her stepmother. According
to Margaret Anne Doody, Burney believed the idea of
eighteenth-century society, including her father and the
second Mrs. Burney, that female writing was "shameful, "
something to be "overcome or subdued"; it was "wrong"
(Introduction viii) . Her "shameful" scribbling was not
"overcome" or "subdued, " however, and she produced