Francesca Saggini. Laura Kopp (trans.). Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts

During the past two decades new attention has been paid to Frances Burney’s theatrical endeavours. Margaret Anne Doody’s seminal literary biography, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (Cambridge, 1988), had led the way in both the recovery of Burney’s plays and in demonstrating how they reveal the writer’s growth as a literary artist. Francesca Saggini’s study, which is an expanded and refined edition of her 2003 book La messinscena dell’identità. Teatro e teatralità nel romanzo inglese del Settecento, is certainly indebted to Doody’s work. However, rather than considering Burney as a dramatist, Saginni is interested in the ways in which the theatrical and performative culture to which Burney was exposed shaped the novels she wrote. Saginni’s aim, as she makes clear throughout this stimulating—and sensitively translated—study, is to examine ‘how the novel renders the dramatic text into narrative through what we might call a transmodal adaptation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plays’ (p. 3). Her focus is therefore on the presence of theatrical conventions, themes and structures within Burney’s novels. To provide the context for this examination, which begins in earnest in chapter 2, Saginni begins with an extended and coherent overview of English theatrical developments from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century. At times the connections to the subsequent arguments appear tangential, however, in its chronological focus and the separation of comedy and tragedy, this chapter serves as an articulate and thoughtful analysis of the progression of Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama. As such, and with its ability to stand apart from the rest of the volume, it will certainly be of value to anyone teaching the period’s drama. Saginni concludes chapter 1 by consciously echoing an argument first made by Laura Brown in English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760 (1981): that the emergence of the novel dovetailed with the drama hitting a ‘dead end’ in terms of its ability to express bourgeois ideology. Frustratingly, however, she resists following through on the questions raised by this argument and the reader is left questioning how this narrative accounts for the flourishing of theatre in the second half of the century. In addition, it is an argument that fails to account for, what Saggini makes clear in subsequent chapters is Burney’s interest in theatre and theatricality, and her drawing on, rather than away from, dramatic conventions within her novels.