Frances Burney (Re)reads The Winter's Tale : Women's ‘Nature’ and Sociability in Evelina and The Woman-Hater

‘Female Difficulties’ feature as a subtitle to Frances Burney's last novel, The Wanderer; Or Female Difficulties (1814), thus making explicit the work's engagement with women's problems and dilemmas at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the action of the book is set. It could be said, however, that ‘female difficulties’ would serve equally well as a subtitle to each of the literary texts Burney produced during her long career, which spanned five decades across two centuries. From her debut novel Evelina (1778) to The Wanderer, in all her novels and plays, Burney's primary concern is women's responses to the expectations and pressures generated by the social structures of the contemporary patriarchal world. In investigating these tensions, Burney is particularly interested in questions pertaining to what should be viewed as ‘natural’ in women's behaviour, and especially whether any ‘natural’ boundaries mark out the spheres of social exchange where women may practise their agency.

These explorations often prompted Burney to creatively revisit the same stories – written by herself and by others – to view them from different angles and prod deeper in her analyses. In this essay, I look at two such revisitations, Burney's debut novel Evelina and her much later comedy The Woman-Hater (1800–2), both of which revolve around the family drama of rupture and reunion, reminiscent of the storyline in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. I propose to examine the two texts by Burney as creative reworkings of the tropes borrowed from The Winter's Tale, and my aim here is to investigate Burney's use of adaptive techniques as a means of questioning existing social paradigms, and especially those establishing what should and what should not be seen as ‘natural’ in women's sociable behaviour. Thus, I join Simone Murray, Carol Poole and Ruxandra Trandafoiu in taking a ‘sociologically oriented approach’ to explore the potential of adaptive practices for ‘critical reworking of power structures’, taking a closer look at authorial engagements with ‘social change, women's status, class rigidity, and symbolic social spaces’. ¹

In the climactic moment of Evelina, towards the end of the story, the young heroine is presented for the first time to her father, who must repent his past crimes and acknowledge his parentage. The scene evokes associations with the final sections of The Winter's Tale, in which Hermione, the wronged queen of Sicilia, appears as a statue to induce contrition in her abusive husband. Burney, I argue in this essay, alludes to Shakespeare's scene to explore not the remorse of the father and husband (which is the chief concern of The Winter's Tale) but the response of the heroine, and to trace the emotional journey she has undergone to reach this point. The focus on Evelina's feelings enables Burney to investigate the models of familial sociability and enquire into what sort of behaviour would be considered ‘natural’ for a woman in the circumstances conjured by the plot and within the existing social patterns.

A crucial point for scrutiny here is feminine agency in carrying out resolutions to the problems presented in the novel. One of the similarities between Burney's Evelina and Shakespeare's Hermione is the fact that their self-displays are contrived and staged by others. Evelina certainly takes no action to bring about the meeting with her father and suffers during it. The novel may even be read to imply that both self-exhibition and agency deployed for one's own benefit, however rightfully one's due, are incongruent with ‘natural’ delicacy in women. However, such an interpretation is also subverted in the novel, and Burney certainly challenged such judgements when she returned to the story and its dilemmas over twenty years later in The Woman-Hater. This later play re-examines the tropes present in Evelina and in The Winter's Tale, namely that of the wronged mother, the lost daughter who needs to be found and feminine agency and self-display that must be enacted for things to become right again. The Woman-Hater appears to ask more explicitly whether self-exhibition and agency must indeed be criticised as unnatural in women.

The Winter's Tale, revised in the mid-eighteenth century, most notably by David Garrick, ² was part of the theatrical repertoire at the time Burney wrote her novels and plays, and thus it operated in the communal imagination of consumers of eighteenth-century culture. Both Shakespeare's original play and Garrick's popular revision pose questions about what is ‘natural’ and what is ‘artful’, and therefore reprehensible, in women's behaviour; they also both consider the importance of nature and nurture in shaping one's character, and, of course, both employ the trope of feminine self-exhibition: that of the queenly statue displayed for a moral lesson. My interest here is in the dialogue into which Burney entered with these questions and tropes as put forth by Shakespeare and by Garrick to point to the intrinsic fluidity of the terms ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ when applied to women's behaviour and their agency.

Evelina as a Return to The Winter's Tale

In Burney's Evelina, the eponymous heroine is the long-lost daughter of a wealthy aristocrat Sir John Belmont, who had mistreated his wife and discarded her when she was still pregnant. Evelina's story thus resembles that of Perdita, the lost child of King Leontes of Sicilia in Shakespeare's play. In Burney's novel, the heroine's mother, Caroline Belmont, dies soon after the birth of Evelina, and the baby is left in the care of the Reverend Arthur Villars. Of course, Villars is not a simple shepherd, such as the one who adopts Perdita in Shakespeare's play, but he is a shepherd nonetheless – a shepherd of souls – and the simplicity of nature which he endeavours to foster in his young charge becomes both Evelina's chief asset and substantial handicap in her dealings with the fashionable society of London.

In some ways, Burney's take on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale resembles that of David Garrick in Florizel and Perdita, first staged in 1756 (and undoubtedly known to Burney), ³ in that both texts concentrate on the young daughter's tale. Jenny Davidson points out that Evelina merges the figures of Hermione and Perdita, ⁴ while Emily Hodgson Anderson shows that in Garrick's version, ‘Perdita, not Hermione, is [the play's] female lead’. ⁵ Garrick's three-act play is much shorter than Shakespeare's, and the story of Leontes and Hermione provides merely the tragic backdrop which can be tied up with the happy reconciliation of all parties. The most striking difference between Garrick's play and Burney's Evelina is the ending, where Burney might be said to enter into debate with Garrick's version. The latter downplays the domestic violence and tragedy of the events in Sicilia and concentrates instead on the bucolic happy ending in pastoral Bohemia. In Evelina, the weddings which close the story are conducted in the shadow of the deaths of not one, but two women abused by John Belmont. One is Evelina's own mother and the other is the mother of Evelina's half-brother, Mr Macartney. The latter might be seen as a character parallel to Mamillius of Shakespeare's play, who is entirely written out of the story by Garrick, presumably so as not to mar the festivities of the ending. In Burney's novel, by contrast, the son of an abused mother survives but she dies in poverty and disgrace. Macartney's mother is yet another woman Belmont had seduced and discarded in his youth, and her story, like that of Caroline Evelyn, serves as a dark reminder that dead women cannot, on the whole, be resurrected, and thus not all misdeeds may be redeemed. Also, Burney's interest is not in the pastoral festivities of reconciliation but in exploring ‘female difficulties’ as experienced in the world ruled by men.

What is intriguing about Garrick's version of The Winter's Tale is the way the ‘natural’ nobility in Perdita is emphasised. A crucial element, singled out by Anderson, is the fact that Perdita, in wishing to marry Florizel or to be recognised by her father, has no mercenary motives. Seeking to grab the riches would be vulgar, and Evelina, like Perdita, needs none of her father's money or title when she is finally presented to him. Burney carefully removes all suspicion of the heroine's harbouring such designs by having Lord Orville propose to her prior to the meeting with Belmont. Evelina's agitation during the encounter is therefore entirely the result of her apparently ‘natural’ abhorrence of self-exhibition and the dread that she may not please the parent she has never seen. As such, she, like Perdita, is shown to be ‘naturally’ lady-like – modest and dutiful – and therefore qualified for the reward of both wealth and social distinction. Anderson notes similar developments in the character of Perdita in Garrick's play, which are revealed in the additional lines given to her. For instance, during the scene when the young people's wedding finally receives the blessing of all the parents, Perdita exclaims: ‘I am all shame / And Ignorance itself, how to put on / This novel garment of gentility’. ⁶ In Anderson's view the lines ‘were meant to be read as a statement of humility—symptomatic of the “natural” innocence that marks Perdita as truly royal’. ⁷ This prompts questions about the ways in which Perdita's nobility is stressed by Garrick as ‘natural’. It may be understood that the virtues she possesses by her royal birth and blood have not been spoilt by her crude upbringing; alternatively, however, the innocence of Garrick's Perdita and her unaffected humility may be seen as an outcome of her having been brought up in an ideal pastoral setting: closer to nature and away from the dissipation and artifice of the court and capital. As a third option it could be suggested that Perdita's winning disposition has been her asset by birth but that it has been able to flourish thanks to her growing up in the supposedly more ‘natural’ environment of the countryside. This last combination seems certainly to describe Burney's Evelina. In one of her letters to Villars, Lady Howard gives this opinion of the heroine:

Nature has been bountiful to her in whatever she had to bestow; and the peculiar attention you have given to her education, has formed her mind to a degree of excellence, that, in one so young, I have scarce ever seen equalled. ⁸

Evelina's ‘natural’ qualities have been cultivated so effectively, it is suggested, because she was placed away from the corruption of luxury and given proper guidance.

What Burney's heroine conspicuously lacks is the polish of bon ton, or, as Lady Howard puts it elsewhere, ‘that politeness which is acquired by an acquaintance with high life’ (p. 22). The desirability of this attribute is, however, repeatedly questioned in the novel, and smooth urbanity is often juxtaposed with behaviours less refined but more ‘natural’. One such discussion appears to echo a conversation between Shakespeare's Perdita and Polixenes in Act IV of The Winter's Tale about flowers grown naturally and those enhanced by human effort. ⁹ Perdita explains her distaste for streaked ‘gillyvors’ on the grounds that ‘There is an art which in their piedness shares / With great creating Nature’. ¹⁰ She then goes on to compare the artificiality of the striking colours in gillyflowers to women's make-up, especially rouge, applied to heighten the wearer's beauty. Perdita herself is, of course, above practising such deceptions (IV.iv.99–103). In Burney's Evelina, the contrast between rouge and natural blush is evoked several times to stress that the heroine needs no cosmetics to improve her complexion. On one occasion, however, Lord Orville's opinion on the distinction between a naturally glowing face and one made-up can be interpreted as pertaining also to the heroine's character. ‘The difference of natural and of artificial colour’, he explains, ‘seems to me very easily discerned; that of Nature is mottled, and varying; that of art, set, and too smooth’ (p. 88). ¹¹ In the same way, perhaps, the attraction of Evelina's character lies in the fact that her reactions to the world around her are not ‘too smooth’ and often lack the polish of those better versed in the rules of high life. All the little blunders show Evelina's character as far from ‘set’ in perfection, and it is this ‘mottled’ combination of timidity and occasional firmness, naivety and intelligence, that make her seem natural and render her attractive to a man like Orville, who may well be tired of young women resembling his fashionable sister, the languid Lady Larpent. ¹²

In contrast to Orville's apathetic sister, Evelina does act with spirit on occasion, perhaps most effectively when she prevents Mr Macartney from committing suicide. In one project, however, she remains entirely passive, almost paralysed, namely in that of claiming her name and social status as Miss Belmont. Even though it is made clear in the novel that the heroine's claims are lawful and though attempts at asserting them are made by other characters, it appears entirely beyond Evelina to even consider how she herself might advance her cause. She continually worries about the possible meeting with Belmont, tormenting herself with what she refers to as ‘the melancholy phantasms of my brain’ (p. 146), but shows no activity to bring about such a meeting. Were it not for the interventions of three other women – Madame Duval, Lady Howard and especially Mrs Selwyn – it is likely that Evelina would have never been acknowledged by her biological father.

When the meeting between father and daughter is effected, it presents a subverted image of the last scene in The Winter's Tale, that is, Hermione's self-display as a statue. It appears that Burney reworks this Shakespearean trope for the same purposes that Shakespeare reworked his own sources for the scene: in the first place to encourage further reflection on them in his own audience and, secondly, to underline the important function of storytelling – and, crucially, of retelling familiar stories – in the processes of communal reformulation of social norms and paradigms. I follow here Eric Langley, who explores the final act of The Winter's Tale as Shakespeare's revisioning of earlier texts, and especially Ovid's Metamorphoses, Robert Greene's romance Pandosto (1588) and John Marston's erotic poem The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image (1598). Langley observes that Pygmalion's sheer lust for the perfect body of Galatea, which is the main theme of Marston's poem, is evoked in The Winter's Tale only to be replaced by Leontes's much more chaste and multi-dimensional longing for his wife, rekindled by her sight in spite of imperfections in her body. ‘But yet, Paulina’, the king notes on beholding the statue of his wife, ‘Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems’(V.iii.27–9). Shakespeare's final scene in The Winter's Tale, Langley notes, both echoes its sources and ‘refuses to be limited by the determining narratives or inclinations of each variously obtrusive or insidious source’. ¹³ And it is true that Shakespeare's climactic moment in Paulina's gallery does offer a new take on the nature of a man's love for a woman, far more complex than merely desiring her body. Burney's revision of this scene in Evelina echoes Shakespeare's take on the Pygmalion myth as well as those of his predecessors, and projects onto them yet another perspective: that of the nature of the feelings a woman must have during the moment of self-exhibition, apparently so crucial for her social survival. In The Winter's Tale, Hermione disappears from the stage entirely after Perdita is taken away from her, to be revealed only seventeen years later; we also have no access to her thoughts as she stands in front of Leontes in that last scene. In Evelina, by contrast, Burney explores both the progression of feelings which the exhibiting woman experiences before she can be produced for the man's assessing gaze and what she feels as she is thus gazed on. The novel's readers are then encouraged to acknowledge the anxieties and terrors that women may experience as they are exposed to be judged by the men on whose approbation all their social prosperity depends.

The scene of exposure in Evelina is further complicated by the fact that the woman to be exhibited before Belmont, the Leontes-like figure in the book, is not the wronged wife but her daughter, a living image of the mother that cannot be resurrected. When Belmont finally meets Evelina, he exclaims ‘My God! does Caroline Evelyn still live! […] she lives – she breathes – she is present to my view! Oh God, that she indeed lived!’ (p. 413). Burney seems to be evoking here not only Leontes's chastened love for his wife's virtuous figure but also the residual possibility of the incestuous attraction felt by Greene's Pandosto, as Belmont exclaims: ‘she has set my brain on fire, and I can see her no more!’ before ‘with violence almost frantic’ (p. 414) he runs out of the room.

While readers might acknowledge the turmoil of feelings that may be troubling Sir John (and perhaps compare it to Leontes's response in The Winter's Tale), the confessing tone of the epistolary narrative directs attention towards the petrified Evelina. The latter approaches the dreaded moment of presenting herself before her father with intense fear and has to be literally dragged into the room. ‘I was almost senseless with terror’, she recounts, ‘I believe I was carried into the house, but I scarce recollect what was done with me’ (p. 411). Excessive emotions cause her to alternately freeze into a statue-like figure or collapse into chaos of involuntary movements and noises. In fact, during most of the scene the heroine's extreme anxiety is revealed as she trembles, sighs, screams, swoons and finally falls to her knees. ¹⁴ The brief moments when Evelina stands mute and rigid – ‘speechless, motionless myself’ (p. 404) – do bring to mind the statue of Hermione in The Winter's Tale, but they also subvert this image. While Shakespeare's Hermione is a monument to feminine integrity, resolutely erect and not to be intimidated by male abusers, whatever their crimes against or power over her, in Burney's novel, Evelina stiffens with fear and can enact no such dignified composure. Readers are given an entirely different picture of feminine self-exhibition: it is an ordeal that almost defeats the heroine, and her intrinsic worth and correctness of conduct prove no protection against the debilitating agitation.

The question which may be asked is whether Evelina should be viewed as a compass pointing towards what is ‘natural’ in young women's behaviour in predicaments such as hers. Or are her apprehensions concerning the meeting with her father excessive? And is her shunning agency by which she may benefit a truly commendable response? Burney avoids straightforward answers to these questions. On the one hand, she dwells on Evelina's anxieties in ways which evoke sympathy for the heroine, and it is never suggested that she should simply pluck up her courage and find Belmont herself. On the other hand, the novel seems to subtly question the conclusions that self-display and agency in promoting one's welfare must be at odds with the very nature of womanhood, and that such practices must never be part of women's sociable interactions. ¹⁵ For instance, even though Evelina's ballroom blunders – when she tries to secure an agreeable dancing partner – end up as spectacular fiascos, the readers’ sympathies remain with the heroine's frustrated efforts. Also, a question appears to hover around these scenes: are there any good reasons for barring women from making choices about who to dance with? Are women not qualified to act for themselves at all? Burney asked these questions much more openly in her later texts, ¹⁶ returning to them in The Woman-Hater, a comedy which offers a very different take on the motif of the abused wife, lost daughter and impostor child. In this later play, all the characters’ problems are solved by a young woman resolutely able to present herself before the men she has never seen before, ask them for money without any ceremony and choose her life partner by herself.

The Woman-Hater as a Return to Evelina and The Winter's Tale

The Woman-Hater was probably composed between 1800 and 1802, ¹⁷ over twenty years after the publication of Evelina, and it shows Burney's urge to reflect anew on familiar tropes. We find out early in the play that about seventeen years before the events that form the plot, the excessive jealousy of Mr Wilmot propelled his wife Eleonora to leave him and make a difficult journey home from the West Indies. The main intrigue revolves around the misunderstanding as to what then happened to the baby daughter of the separated couple. The truth is that Eleonora took little Sophia with her, but, as in Evelina, the baby's scheming nurse managed to persuade the father that her own daughter, Joyce, was the real Miss Wilmot. As a result, both parents are convinced that their spouse has shown no interest in the child for seventeen years. Wilmot, in fact, thinks much worse of his wife when he finds she is accompanied by a girl who also appears to be her daughter. He is then affected by a complicated mixture of emotions: on the one hand – like Leontes or Belmont before – he has long realised his fault in driving his wife into despair, and he still has affection and admiration for her; on the other hand, he views Eleonora's guilt as much greater than his own: it appears to him that she first abandoned her child – a conduct he deems most unnatural – and then presumably formed a liaison which resulted in the birth of another girl out of wedlock.

As the long-anticipated scene of the meeting between Eleonora and Wilmot finally unfolds in Act V, the audience's expectations for reconciliation between the couple – Hermione and Leontes style – are quickly dispersed. Instead of a revival of reciprocal affection, there emerges an entirely different climax: that of growing tension and mutual repulsion. To Wilmot, the statuesque uprightness of Eleonora appears not a testimony to her probity of conduct, but rather a proof of hardened vice. ‘Perfidious woman’, he exclaims, ‘Art thou, then, transformed from all I thought purest, fairest, to all from which my soul must recoil? […] Thou dauntless criminal!’. ¹⁸ Appearing like a sculpture has, in fact, no positive connotations at all. When the metaphor is employed, it is to represent stony insensitivity. Wilmot uses it as a hyperbole when he reflects on his own response to what he perceives as his wife's depravity: ‘Am I turned to stone? – Do I witness this – and suffer it?’ (V.xiv.6).

Patient endurance and genteel shunning of self-exhibition and agency are, in fact, represented in the play as entirely inadequate responses to challenges typically posed for women in social exchanges, and these may range from domestic violence to men's habitual predatory attitude. Eleonora's earlier escape from her tyrannical husband is treated with understanding, and Wilmot appears to fully comprehend his guilt. As the events in the play commence, Eleonora displays her agency again, and for prudential reasons. In fact, what brings both parents to the same spot in the country, though unbeknownst to each other, is the same errand, namely, to secure for Miss Wilmot the inheritance of her wealthy uncle, Sir Roderick, and her rich aunt, Lady Smatter. Eleonora and Sophia do not speak so plainly about the pecuniary side to their purpose, in contrast to the pretend Miss Wilmot, but it is clear nonetheless that they, too, aim to present themselves to Eleonora's brother and Wilmot's sister and persuade them to provide for their niece. How they go about this task is a source of much tension and tragicomedy in the play.

On the whole, the two women's lady-like reserve and refinement hinder rather than help their cause. Eleonora spends most of her time mustering the courage to speak to one or another member of her family, and when she finally approaches her sister-in-law, Lady Smatter, she utterly fails in securing her help. Sophia, though more active, fares even worse. In her first search for her uncle, she confuses Sir Roderick with his dependant cousin, Old Waverley. When she persuades the elderly gentleman to see her mother in their cottage, Waverley becomes fully convinced he is following a young harlot into the den of her bawd. When Sophia finally manages to present herself to Sir Roderick, she is so unconvincing that he swiftly sends her away and congratulates himself on having dismissed an insinuating impostor. By the time Wilmot and Eleonora finally meet in Act V, the mother and daughter have entangled themselves so completely in a web of blunders and misunderstandings, it is hard to see how they can be extricated. To make matters worse, the conversation between the spouses appears to lead only to further mutual accusations and misconstructions.

In Evelina, it was enough to make Sir John Belmont take one look at his daughter to acknowledge his parentage. Here, merely exhibiting Sophia to her father cannot suffice to persuade him to own her. With the mother alive, the paternity may, of course, be doubted. The final proof is delivered from the most unlikely quarter: Eleonora's story is confirmed by Joyce, who all her life had believed herself to be Miss Wilmot, and who has newly discovered the truth of her far less elevated descent.

Joyce had been as much imposed on by her mother, the Nurse, as Wilmot and his real family. For seventeen years, she had to curb what appear to be her natural instincts, which are to dance, skip, sing and eat ‘Minced veal and Pancakes’ especially ‘when one is famished’ (III.viii.64–100). Instead, she had to behave in a manner expected of a studious and restrained Miss Wilmot. Once Joyce learns of the Nurse's machinations and of her own true parentage, she finds herself relieved that she will no longer have to sustain this painful performance and proclaims her freedom from the shackles of lady-like behaviour: ‘I’m kept in such subjection! I’ve no comfort of my life […] There's nothing but ordering, and tutoring, and scolding, and managing […] and reading! […] And I don’t chuse to put up with it any longer’ (IV.vii.22–8).

In the play, Joyce becomes the means through which the constructed and performative character of ‘proper’ feminine conduct is most clearly manifested. The scene which introduces her reveals the way in which she – as Miss Wilmot – continually moves between two extreme modes of behaviour: in the presence of Wilmot she pores over books which she neither understands nor has any interest in. She also remains almost entirely motionless and mute – a petrified statue of put-on gentility. But as soon as Wilmot leaves the room, Joyce becomes quite another person:

Miss Wilmot: Is papa gone?

Nurse: Yes, Miss. […]

Miss Wilmot (jumping up and singing). Then hoity toity, whiskey, friskey, / These are the joys of our dancing days – Now let's get rid of all this stupifying learning! […] Now, Nurse, don’t you begin to be cross! Have not I been curbed long enough? […]

Nurse: Miss! Miss! Is this behaving for a young lady? (II.iv.28–65)

‘Behaving for a young lady’ clearly signifies put-on sedateness and restraint, and not only of the movement of the woman's body but also of any urges that may be dictated by her physicality. When Joyce is left to herself in Lady Smatter's house, she gorges on sweetmeats, tries all the smelling bottles and revels in the cosmetics. Prim, Lady Smatter's waiting woman, is horrified to witness such extravagance and exclaims: ‘Those things are only put there not to be touched’ (IV.iv.5–6). In other words, if a proper lady were to indulge in such sensual pleasures at all, she would do it only sparingly and in secret, as Lady Smatter evidently does. Even more shockingly, Joyce does not hide her attraction to young villager Bob Sapling. She is especially excited at his boasting of bare-knuckle boxing skills: ‘What! Can you fight? How delightful! How I should like to see you!’ (II.iv.79–80). A spectacle of men's half-naked bodies engaged in a fight is unlikely to be openly coveted by a genteel young lady such as the real Sophia Wilmot or Evelina, but Joyce appears positively thrilled at the very thought.

When Joyce learns the truth about her parents, she exclaims to the despairing Nurse: ‘If I must be something – I had rather be a ballad singer than anything else!’ (IV.viii.84–5). This offers an interesting reversal of Perdita's story in The Winter's Tale, where ballad singers also feature, but as a rustic contrast to the striking nobility of mien in the foundling daughter of the Shepherd. In the same way as Perdita, in her reduced circumstances, cannot help but reveal her noble birth, neither can Joyce entirely subdue her instinct as a shoe-maker's daughter despite her genteel education. But, interestingly, the sympathies of the audience appear to be directed more towards the unsophisticated Joyce than the proper young lady Sophia, who, one cannot but agree, is ‘a relatively dull and shadowy character’. ¹⁹ Joyce, by contrast, with her spontaneity and frankness offers exhilarating moments of freedom, as when she shouts to Bob: ‘I’m all for Liberty! – Liberty, Liberty, Bob!’ (IV.vii.28–9). Also, despite her evident inaptitude for study, Joyce is by no means unintelligent and certainly not ineffective. In contrast to the stumbling Sophia, Joyce enters the scenes of familial sociability with confidence and éclat: immediately to secure Sir Roderick's friendship and perhaps some of his fortune.

First of all, Joyce – in contrast to Sophia, or Evelina in Burney's earlier novel – appears to have no apprehension about presenting herself before Sir Roderick. Neither fear of putting herself before the man's assessing gaze, nor anxieties about the possible impropriety of demanding money from him, appear to hinder her. When she arrives at Sir Roderick's house and is confronted with two men of similar age and dress, she avoids Sophia's blunders by simply asking: ‘Pray, Gentlemen, will you tell me which of you two is Sir Roderick?’ (V.iv.9–10). Once she learns whom to approach, she gets straight to the point:

Now, if you’d be so kind, so good-natured, as to give me a few of your thousand pounds – […] ‘Twill make you quite giddy to see how I shall whisk it about! I’ll go to plays, – I’ll go balls, – I’ll go to Operas, […] And I’ll make a large, huge, gigantic bonfire of all Aunt Smatter's Books and Authors for joy! (V.iv.66–100)

This last promise is what finally persuades Sir Roderick, who had for years born a grudge against Lady Smatter's literary interests after she rejected his own suit in favour of the more bookish Lord Smatter (now deceased). Joyce therefore pulls just the string to make Sir Roderick her friend. His reaction leaves no doubts, and Joyce triumphantly exclaims: ‘I’ve gained the day! I’ve gained the day!’ (V.iv.103). In shedding the trappings of genteel femininity, Joyce appears to gain confidence, and she uses her apparently natural activity to secure a prosperous future for herself. In this scene of familial self-display, the motif of the feminine statue, either as a symbol of statuesque righteousness or petrified stillness, is not to be found. In The Woman Hater, Burney deploys the trope differently: the stiffened gentility Joyce enacted as Miss Wilmot was in fact an incarcerating cast from which she is allowed to break out to be her active self. Thus, while Burney had her readers sympathise with Evelina's anxieties about claiming her father's name and fortune, The Woman-Hater appears to champion the feisty girl who has no qualms about standing up for herself.

At the same time, Joyce displays moral backbone as she refuses to play along in the Nurse's plot to rob the real Miss Wilmot of her father's name and all her uncle's inheritance. When Joyce and the Nurse accidentally become aware of Eleonora and Sophia's meeting with Wilmot in Act V, which seems to be leading only to further rupture in the family, Joyce refuses to remain a passive by-stander: ‘I won’t be held, Nurse, I won’t! […] And I can’t abide to see his own flesh and blood upon her knees there for nothing. I’ll tell it all, I will so! I hate a fib’ (V.xvi.1–3). Joyce is no underhanded schemer to benefit at the expense of others’ misery. Nor will she desert a friend in need. When the Nurse prepares to decamp, worried about the consequences that might ensue when the truth about her machinations comes out, Joyce offers to defend her against Wilmot's wrath: ‘She has taken my part hundreds and hundreds of times; and if I don’t take hers now –’ (V.xvi.22–3).

Joyce's relationship with and response to the Nurse show, too, her astute judgement. When she is asked by Sir Roderick what she thinks of her mother, she answers without hesitation: ‘Nothing but a vulgar, jabbering old woman […] [but] that don’t hinder me liking her. I like her better than anybody; but she is a poor little mean old Soul, for all that’ (V.v.59–63). This matter-of-fact assessment and genuine candour stand in stark contrast to the exaltation displayed by Sophia or Evelina, who both bend to embrace the knees of their fathers as soon as they are recognised as daughters. ²⁰ The contrast prompts reflections on the sources of filial affection: is it a matter of duty irrespective of parental behaviour, or should such affection be expected to grow only when it is deserved? The feelings expressed by Evelina and Sophia do not seem merely affected; rather they appear the result of the girls’ education which instils filial reverence of fathers even if they turn out to be abusive tyrants. When Lady Howard first writes to Belmont – when he is still believed by all to be an unprincipled rake, she assures him ‘that to merit your approbation will be the first study of [Evelina's] life’ (p. 148). Neither Lady Howard nor anyone else in the novel questions that Evelina should feel anything but duty and respect for her biological father, whatever his crimes against her or her mother. Joyce's freezing in the presence of Wilmot when she believes herself to be his daughter is an exaggerated illustration of similar instructions – she, like Evelina, also must view it as ‘the first study of her life’ to live up to her father's expectations, even if they disagree with her own wishes. It also shows, as Barbara Darby points out, ‘that an insistence on rigidly governed behavior or “natural” hierarchy of father/husband over wives and daughters is especially dangerous for women and leaves for male figures little to choose between authoritarianism and antagonism’. ²¹

It may be useful at this point to consider Wilmot's name, which may bring to mind the figure of John Wilmot, the infamous Earl of Rochester. Burney's righteous Wilmot appears, on first sight, the very opposite of the dissolute Restoration rake. Sir Belmont in Evelina would be a closer likeness of the Earl. We know, however, that Burney was very careful when choosing names for her characters, ²² and therefore if she intended to evoke associations between Rochester and Wilmot in the play, it may have been to point out that profligacy and punctiliousness are in fact two sides of the same coin when it comes to sociable encounters between men and women. The paradigms that are incapacitating and subordinating women propel men to take up the position of either rakish sexual predators or overscrupulous domestic tyrants. Interestingly, these warped models of behaviour appear to operate predominantly in ‘polite society’ but by dropping her pretensions to it, Joyce seems better able to resist them and act for herself: she can stand in front of men, demand what she feels is her due and thus elude the vicious circles in which women typically end up victims. What is more, Joyce evidently plans to arrange her family by defying patriarchal structures: ‘I’ll marry Bob! […] I’ll make [him] do everything I bid him’ (V.xii.27–30). Perhaps her ambitions to govern a bare-knuckle boxer may be naïve, but readers are encouraged to applaud her in the endeavour.

Throughout the play, the contrast between Sophia and Joyce shows that lady-like creatures are very graceful and admirable in their way, but they certainly have difficulties getting things done. Joyce, meanwhile, is straightforward, uncomplicated and effective, and it is thanks to her activity that all the play's dilemmas are resolved and all the characters can pick up their family lives and love pursuits where they left them off sixteen years previous: Wilmot and Eleonora can reconstruct their marriage, Sir Roderick may court Lady Smatter once more and the two girls appear to have their futures fixed. In The Woman-Hater it is Joyce, therefore, a rustic in the garb of a lady, who is the true Perdita of the story: the one that must be found for the story to reach its happy ending. Francesca Saggini points out, however, that the ending of The Woman-Hater is happy only for Joyce. The societal microcosm of the represented world, she demonstrates, ‘has not been reformed and its potential for abuse has not been extinguished’. ²³ This is true, but the key is that this potential has been identified. Perhaps the play's closure can be viewed as a new opening, and it is left for the audience to reflect on whether the characters must inevitably return to the habitual – not natural – patterns of subjection and abuse, or whether they might try to remodel the very same patterns.

Burney's mode of creative writing, we know, often involved adapting and recycling her own and other authors’ texts. ²⁴ Evelina is a return to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Garrick's revision of the play but also to Burney's own juvenile ‘The History of Caroline Evelyn’. ²⁵ The Woman-Hater draws on all the above and on Burney's own first play, The Witlings, recasting some of its characters in entirely new circumstances. ²⁶ While revisiting familiar literary material was a means of artistic development for Burney, today's adaptation scholars point out that explorations of well-known stories in new contexts are some of the best ways to engage audiences. ²⁷ Once audiences are engaged, it is of course easier to invite them to note, investigate and possibly reconsider the social questions of interest to the author. The approach adopted in this article to scrutinise Burney's adaptive strategies highlights her interest in the roles allotted to women within familial sociability. In her two returns to the tropes from The Winter's Tale discussed here, Burney retells the well-known story of family breakup and reconciliation from new perspectives, each time exploring the territory of women's attitudes and emotions, and the space allowed to their agency in the context of sociable exchanges. Her examinations do not necessarily offer ready solutions, but they certainly prompt her audience to question the accepted paradigms of what should be seen as ‘natural’ within the framework of sociable practices both within the family and within broader social contexts.