A Busy Day

Book: A Busy Day by Fanny Burney
Pages: 127
Finished: May, 2009
Challenges:
** Casual Classics
** 18th & 19th Century Women Authors
** New Authors
** Read and Review
** 2009 Themed Reading
** Spring Reading Thing

First Sentence: "There! there! open that door! To the right I say!"

From Amazon:
"A Busy Day is a love story, as well as a witty and wonderfully observed satire on class and greed by the most popular woman writer of her time. The scene is London in the summer of 1800. In the course of just one busy day, we are gleefully tumbled into a world of frustrated love, mistaken identity, snobbery, and downright vulgar bad manners."


This was just that---a gleeful romp--although the lack of manners exhibited by the aristocracy was down right shocking at times. One must consider the biography of the author to fully appreciate this little satiric comedy of manners and lack thereof.

Since this is one of Fanny's plays---written in 1800 but not published until the 1990's--I had to read this in play form. This is not my preferred choice for reading material, but after I got several pages into it, I was able to keep all the characters straight without looking at the front of the book where all the characters and their relation to each other was written out. Because there is not really any action, just rapier quick dialogue it took me longer than usual to keep the characters straight in my mind!

From Wikepedia
All of Burney’s (June 13, 1752- January 6, 1840) novels explore the lives of English aristocrats, and satirize their social pretensions and personal foibles, with an eye to larger questions such as the politics of female identity. With one exception, Burney never succeeded in having her plays performed, largely due to objections from her father who thought that publicity from such an effort would be damaging to her reputation. The exception was Edwy and Elgiva, which unfortunately was not well received by the public and closed after the first night’s performance.

Although her novels were hugely popular during her lifetime, following her death Burney’s reputation as a writer suffered at the hands of biographers and critics who felt that the extensive diaries, published posthumously in 1841, offered a more interesting and accurate portrait of eighteenth century life. Today, however, critics are returning to her novels and plays with a renewed interest in her perspective on the social lives and struggles of women in a predominantly male-oriented culture. Scholars continue to value Burney’s diaries as well, for their candid depictions of eighteenth-century English society^.

Her early novels were read and enjoyed by Jane Austen, whose own title Pride and Prejudice derives from the final pages of Cecilia. Throughout her career as a writer, her wit and talent for satirical caricatures were widely acknowledged. While some early historians derided the “feminine sensibility” of her writing, her fiction is now widely acknowledged for its critical wit and for its deliberate exploration of the lives of women.