#LivefromLucy: 'The Room and the World. Frances Burney's Paper Houses' with Professor Francesca Saggini

Wed 27 October 2021

Lucy Cavendish College

This talk will map Frances Burney’s life and works from the vantage viewpoint of material studies, considering some of the houses the author lived, sojourned and worked in. The tension between the contending discourses of ‘public’ house and ‘private’ house / home – the house as a space for entertainment and a cultural hub used to promote visibility and augment cultural capital 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 in St Martin’s Street where Charles Burney held fashionable musical soirées – and the idyllic Surrey cottage Burney was able to build with the profits from the her third novel Camilla (1796), quite significantly named ‘Camilla Cottage’, where she moved in with her husband, Alexandre d’Arblay, in 1797. This talk will also consider the symbolic, often mythopoetic value, associated with Burney’s houses as artificial, cultural mythoi, in a deeply-freighted paradigmatic shift from early authorial propriety to later authorial property.

About the speaker

Professor Francesca Saggini is Professor of English Literature at the Università della Tuscia (Italy) and Marie Sklodowska Individual Fellow at the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science, University of Edinburgh. She has been a Senior Associate at Lucy Cavendish College since 2017.

Please register to receive Zoom joining instructions for this event. This event is free and open to all.

Cost: Free