CECILIA (Annotated)

Frances Burney's Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) is a richly structured novel of manners that follows Cecilia Beverley, a young heiress whose fortune is entangled with social expectation, guardianship, marriage, and the tyranny of names and inheritance. Written in Burney's acute, satirical prose, the novel combines comic observation with moral seriousness, standing between Richardsonian ...