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JA and Fanny Burney   Written by Line (5/18/2010 11:09 a.m.)
Are you new?

I knew that JA was a fan of her contemporary fellow author, Fanny Burney, and that P&P's title was actually taken from one of Burney's novels (though I don't know which), but I didn't realize that there are other references to Burney's novels in P&P. The Oxford World's Classics edition of P&P I picked up recently lists the following:

Ch.6: Darcy: "Every savage can dance."

"What dancing?...it is certainly a Barbarian exercise, and of savage origin." (Cecelia, vol.1, Book 4, ch.7)

Ch.31: Lady Catherine: "...music... It is of all subjects my delight."

"Music is my passion." (Madame Duval in "Evelina", vol. 1, Letter 21) (IMO, this is pushing it a bit. Madame Duval can't be the only person, real or fictional, who ever declared her love for music, but the others will ring a bell for anyone who knows P&P! - L.)

Ch.47: Mary: "...loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable...her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful"

Mary's "useful lesson" is a parody of a passage in one of the letters of Mr. Villars in FB's "Evelina" (vol.2, Letter 8).

"Remember, my dear Evelina, nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman: it is, at once, the most beautiful and most brittle of all human things."

Ch.58: Elizabeth: "Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."

A refinement on FB's "Camilla":

"Ah! my dear Uncle! how kind a memory is your's! retaining only what can give pleasure, and burying in oblivion whatever might cause pain!" (Book 4, ch.9)

Actually, this time around I found it a little ironic that Elizabeth gives Darcy this advice, because in ch.51 we were told that "(Lydia and Wickham) seemed each of them to have the happiest memories in the world. Nothing of the past was recollected with pain," and I don't think *they're* being set up as a good example! ;-) - L.

On a slightly different topic, in ch.59, Elizabeth tells Jane that "Perhaps I did not always love (Darcy) so well as I do now. But in such cases as these a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself." Convenient to have a memory like that!


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