Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

She is very well bred, & expresses herself with much modesty, upon all subjects – which in an Authoress, a woman of known understanding, is extremely pleasing. The authorial modesty Frances Burney attributes to Frances Brooke may not be as valued today as it was in the eighteenth century. We have come to consider the “Modest Muse” a significantly limiting concept, often employed to restrict an author's access to or productivity within the print marketplace. Burney's description of the modest “Authoress” with whom she shares authorial initials deftly captures the subtle displacements and inhibitions that propriety enforces upon intellectual labor (or, as she puts it, “known understanding”). Yet if eighteenth-century authors were encumbered by expectations of modesty, no such burden exists for the twenty-first-century critic. Indeed, recent studies of eighteenth-century fiction and print culture suggest that modern critics might profit from a more modest account of the novel. The print medium has, of course, the advantage of a more concrete and accessible body of lasting evidence than many other communications networks. But since the revival of interest in the history of the book in the last decade, this advantage has often encouraged scholars of eighteenth-century prose fiction to grant the novel a crucial and representative role in the communications revolution of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text