Evelina

By: Frances Burney

Narrated by: Dame Judi Dench, Finty Williams, Geoffrey Palmer

Fanny Burney's wickedly funny satire follows the trials and romantic adventures of the young and beautiful Evelina as she tries to make her way through 18th-century Britain handicapped by her three great problems: being poor, being illegitimate - and being a girl.

Evelina was a raging best seller when it was first published in 1778 and is widely credited with being the first of the great British domestic novels. Burney was a direct influence on her immediate follower, Jane Austen, who used some of the final lines from Burney’s novel Cecilia for one of her own fairly successful novels: "...if to pride and prejudice you owe your miseries...to pride and prejudice you will also owe their termination".

Public Domain (P)2008 Silksoundbooks Limited

What great fun to go back in time in England

First I must comment on the great narration! The only one of the trio I was not familiar with was Flinty Williams who did a marvelous job as Evelina as a young woman!

The book, I believe, is set during the regency period. At that time people wrote many letters often of some length. That is the means via which our story is moved.

Our heroine, Evelina, has been raised in the country by a parson in who's care her dying mother entrusted. She is well educated by him and, we learn, very comely though very innocent as she enters London's society.

I found the novel to be more a coming of age story than a love one. If you are interested in the times and manners of the period, as well as how people wrote and spoke, you should find this story most enlightening and enjoyable.

Well-performed, classic women's lit

The narration is quite strong. I'll say that the values driving the narrative are dated to an alienating degree, leaving the novel interesting for people with a historical interest in the novel. On its own, outside of scholarly interest, it's fine? It's nowhere near the level of Udolpho or even Old Manir House, largely because Evelina herself is generally cowardly.

Too many characters

The narration was good, but I found the story line tedious with way more characters than were necessary to advance Evelina's journey.

I am astonished

This was an amazingly complex witty and astonishingly relatable considering the time period. No one could have performed the innocence of Evelina as well as Finty Williams. Not to mention the way she captured the secondary and tertiary characters. I relished in the romantic diction of this book!

Great performances, exasperating & rewarding story

First, the performances are extraordinary, particularly the lead, Finty Williams, who voices Evelina and a wide range of disparate characters, credibly being a teenager girl, a salty sea captain, and various young aristocratic cads.

The story--well, it begins and ends largely in pleasant romantic fashion. Young, innocent girl with a good heart is thrust into the large, scary world. That is quite enjoyable, if well-trod territory. However, there is an early middle section that is rather tough to get through, where we spend time with uncouth and oafish characters who play practical jokes on each other and respond with tiresome indignation. This goes on and on. It reminded me of the clowns of Shakespeare's comedies, so often tiresome but not without their narrative and thematic purposes.

There are plenty of threads of darker, weightier material in the book. Evelina finds herself in some pretty scary situations in which I was unsure how far the author was willing to go. The book does an excellent job illustrating the duplicitous nature of men when courting a beautiful young woman and how corruption can so glibly wear the face of gentility.

There are many passages that are exquisitely written, which contrast all the more with the dialogue of the "low" characters. I was sad to the leave the core cast of characters by the end--Evelina, Orville, her foster father--and I will certainly, in time, look for another Frances Burney novel with which to pass the lonely, mundane hours shuttling to and from work.