AboutNovels.com
Title
Provide Information About Novels
Description
This is a masculine-centered tale that is fairly realistic about being set in medieval England. There are jousts and men in armor, feisty barons on noble steeds, etc. The tale has real ghosts who want some serious justice and get it! It is a short work in the "fragment" style.
This novel is so mainstream now it seems hardly necessary to comment on it; scholarly journals have devoted entire issues to critical analyses of this novel. The novel is told by a passive aggressive young woman who is trapped in a society that gives her no-win, double-bind rules about life. Evelina is a real woman; at time she is a sweet girl, a snob, a catty teenager, a craven coward, an innocent victim in a frightening world of rapists and prostitutes, a clever commentator on a crazy society ...
This is one of the greatest novels ever written in my opinion. In the 1780s and 1790s, characters in other novels read Cecilia and praise the book. Burney's diaries are full of comments from readers as well, letting us know just about everyone who was anyone in those days read the novel. The novel is so rich and so full of vivid, creative, memorable characters that it is difficult to convey in a few words the power of the book. At one point during my first reading of the novel, I hurled the book from me across the room in a burst of passion about a plot twist--in the eight or nine years that I've been reading since then, I've never again experienced such enraged engagement with a novel.
Languages
English
Contact
- S.K.C. Networks Inc.
