Frances Burney: A Houstory

This article maps Frances Burney’s life and works from the vantage point of material studies, considering the houses the author lived, sojourned, and worked in. The tension between the contending discourses of “public” house and “private” house—the house as a space for entertainment and a cultural hub used to promote visibility and augment cultural capital, as opposed to the “private” house as the locus of intimacy and family life—is exemplified by the juxtaposition between the houses Frances Burney lived in as her father’s daughter (in particular the famous house at 35 St. Martin’s Street, London) and the idyllic Surrey dwellings Burney moved into with her husband, Alexandre d’Arblay, after 1793. This article will consider the symbolic, often mythopoetic value associated with Burney’s houses as artificial, cultural mythoi and her poetics of indirect, oblique association to accrue cultural and social capital.Licensing © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent