Sublime

She would be wife or servant, perhaps both.

Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) are by Frances (or Fanny) Burney; Belinda (1801) is by Maria Edgeworth. Burney, the most acclaimed novelist of the late eighteenth century, was, along with Samuel Richardson, the most important influence on Jane Austen’s work. Burney’s novels consistently focus on the tribulations—romantic and otherwise—of a young

the beautiful relation of marriage and the lovely women who were mothers and nothing else;

In those days a young girl of decent breeding could make no advances whatever, and barely respond, indeed, to those that were made. She was expected to sit still in her chair with her eyes on the carpet, watching the spot where the mystic handkerchief should fall.

Her mother, too, had possessed this dangerous faculty of tears; and it was not wonderful if the sober-minded Doctor, roused for the first time to consider his little girl as a creature possessed of individual character, should recognise, with a thrill of dismay, the appearance of the same qualities which had wearied his life out, and brought his yo

But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way. Mr. Allen, who owned the chief53 of the property about Fullerton, the village in Wiltshire where the Morlands lived,54 was ordered to Bath for the benefit of a gouty constitution;55—