„Moje siostrzyce po piórze”. Jane Austen wobec poprzedniczek

The paper, starting from the analysis of Northanger Abbey, suggests reflection on the attitude of Jane Austen to her predecessors, Ann Radcliffe, Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth etc., but also the other both fertile and popular authors of the end of 18th and the beginning of 19th century. Using the research of Dale Spender and Brian Corman, the author presents the novelist as a conscious heiress of a significant, though successfully marginalised in the Victorian period and overlooked even today, female literary tradition. Taken from Linda Hutcheon, the definition of parody allows to compare in the end Northanger Abbey to Strach w Zameczku of the first Polish novelist, who referred in a very similar way to her foreign predecessors, Anna Mostowska.

FANNY BURNEY’S EPISTOLARY ROMANTICISM AND BLOGGING

Fanny Burney at 15 wrote in her diary addressing her thoughts to ‘Nobody’, to her silent ‘self’ and interlocutor. Nobody learnt about this fact until her diaries were published. She became famous with her first epistolary novel about a young lady entering the world, though in the Preface to the novel the author pretended to be an editor of the letters. Her writing could be compared to contemporary blogs. Novelty and variety of subjects, personally coloured irony and wit, acute eyesight, ability to entertain a reader with an unusual insight of the ordinary event or situation (e.g., ‘Directions for Coughing, Sneezing, or Moving Before the King and Queen’), a dramatist talent to create dialogues and remember speaker’s intonation and other speech parameters, a lot of short fragments imprinting emotions and restoring the epoch in diaries and letters, - everything features her style and specifies her as a Romanticism writer. Some of the subjects could be accepted as obsolete though regarding different situations, circumstances and the performance the given descriptions of the royal household politely discussed by the Keeper of the Robe to Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, and a close acquaintance of British famous actor David Garrick (1717-1779) and even world-known painter Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) some of the episodes described in diaries could be praised for their author’s dramatic playwright talent. Blogging in its well-written form, the one possessing style and distinguishing good literature characteristics, could be compared to diaries reflecting every instant of modern life and becoming immediately public. Freedom of female voice in Romantic era and freedom of mass-media writer and reader on the verge of Millennium are manifested in both epochs

‘My Immense Mass of Manuscripts’: Fanny Burney as Archivist, Biographer and Autobiographer

This article looks at Frances Burneys contribution to life writing through her composition, preservation and curatorship of her own personal archive and management of family papers. It charts Burneys chronic anxieties about the possible interpretation of the record that she had created, and the tension between self-expression and self-exposure which underlay her very revealing difficulties with editing, archivism and publication.