I suppose it is not sentimental enough!

Abstract

Despite its dramatic description of weeping, fainting, nervous disorder and recovery of long-lost family members, Frances Burney`s novel Evelina is traditionally regarded as a novel of manners and thus as a far cry from eighteenth-century sentimental fiction. The representation of feeling in this novel therefore is either dismissed as unimportant or subordinated to the discussion of propriety. This article argues that feeling in Evelina deserves critical scrutiny ptecisely because the novel is not sentimental enough. By comparing moments of intense emotion in Burney`s novel and those in contemporary sentimental fiction, I would reveal Burney`s disapproval and revision of the emotional paradigms popularized by sentimental novelists. While Laurence Sterne and Henry Mackenzie believe that to feel intensely means to feel spontaneously, privileging impulsive passion that fragments human interactions into moments of transport, Burney maintains that the virtue of feeling lies in its ability to cement interpersonal connections and to last through such desirable ties. This reading will refocus the issue of powet in Evelina, not least by showing how and why feeling becomes an unexpected and unlikely source of power for both genders.