SOURCE: “Evelina Revisited,” Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1965, pp. 3-19.

In the following essay, Malone offers a summary of Evelina in the hopes of renewing critical interest in the novel.

The bicentennial of Fanny Burney's first and best novel is still fourteen years off as I write, but if I am to have a share in that event it will have to be well ahead of time, since I shall hardly be there (or indeed anywhere) in the flesh when the celebration starts. As it happens, I have just read Evelina again, after long neglect, and the reading moves me to write this essay, which I will end with a few words about the characters as they seem to each other; to each other, I say, because, in virtue of the epistolary form that the author chose to give her book, she kept herself off the...