CECS Research Seminar

'Pursuing and Publishing Frances Burney d'Arblay's Journals and Letters, 1768-1840'

Peter Sabor, McGill University

The collected edition of Frances Burney’s journals and letters, begun forty years in 1972, is now nearing completion at last, with twenty-three volumes in print or soon to be published. Two further volumes of “additional journals and letters” remain to complete the collection in twenty-five volumes: one covering the years 1784-86 and a final volume, gathering together some 130 hitherto unpublished letters from the period 1791 to 1840. This paper shall discuss work on this volume, explaining where these new letters have been found and considering some of the problems that their manuscripts pose to the modern editor.

Peter Sabor is Chair in Eighteenth Century Studies and Director of the Burney Centre at McGill University. He is the author of Pamela in the Marketplace, general editor of Frances Burney's Court Journals for OUP, and general editor of Samuel Richardson's Works and Correspondence for CUP. He is currently working on a biography of Jane Austen.