SOURCE: “Evelina: Gulphs, Pits, and Precipices,” in Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy, University of Kentucky Press, 1987, pp. 23-52.

In the following excerpt, Straub examines Burney's portrayal of female maturity in Evelina and finds that her treatment of independent, mature women depicts two opposing female fates: the idealization of romantic love as the only acceptable feminine goal versus negative eighteenth-century ideological assumptions about female maturity.

Fanny Burney published her first novel, Evelina; or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, when she was twenty-six years old and a spinster. Still young enough to be treated as a “young lady” by her friend and mentor Samuel Johnson, Burney was nonetheless on the brink of becoming an “old maid,” one of the most problematic and vulnerable roles for a woman in the eighteenth century, in part because of its marginal economic status, but also because female...