Book Review: Cecilia by Frances Burney

Cecilia by Frances Burney

Book title: Cecilia
Author: Frances Burney
Genre: Classic
Published: 1782
1004 pages
My rating: 4/5

Cecilia Beverley is an heiress who can only keep her fortune if her husband agrees to take her surname. Surrounded by fortune-hunters and other people who want to use her money for their own gain, the beautiful and virtuous Cecilia has to navigate the world with only the help of three questionable guardians. She falls in love with Mortimer Delvile, the son of one of her guardians, but his father insists that he keeps the family name, and it seems impossible they will ever have their happy ending.

Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress is Frances Burney’s second novel, published in 1782. I started this book for this year’s Jane Austen July, but as the book is closer to thousand pages (plus foreword and appendices), it took me over two months to finish it. I don’t usually mind long classics, but Cecilia was way too long.

“Cecilia, disturbed, uncertain, comfortless, could frame her mind to no resolution; she walked about the room, deliberated, – determined, – wavered and deliberated again.”

This quote is Cecilia (and the main character) in a nutshell. 940 pages of the main character deciding to do something, backing down, deciding to do it again, and backing down again. The same conversations are repeated over and over. There are a host of unnecessary and annoying characters giving dozens of inconsequential monologues. This book could have easily been condensed into half or even one third of its length without losing anything relevant.

For the first half of the book, Cecilia is very naïve and easily taken advantage of by her profligate guardian, Mr. Harrell, who again and again convinces Cecilia to give him money so he can pay off his debts. Mr. Harrell is so despicable and Cecilia so naïve that for several times I seriously considered DNFing the book. (As a sidenote: the narrator claims that Cecilia is intelligent, but she is easily duped by every villain in the book!) After we finally get rid of Mr. Harrell, the focus moves to Cecilia’s and Mortimer Delvile’s relationship and the reasons why it can never be. For hundreds of pages, they both deny their feelings, and even after they at last agree on a clandestine marriage without the consent of Delvile’s parents, Cecilia goes back and forth with her decision, never being able to make up her mind.

Cecilia was nowhere near the charming and enjoyable reading experience that Burney’s first novel Evelina was. I’ll give it four stars for the few and far between good parts (bonus points for inspiring the title of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice), but I would only recommend it to people who have a serious interest in 18th-century literature. This book is not for a casual reader of classics.