The Vicar of Wakefield is a tale with marriage at its core. This chapter puts that preoccupation in historical and cultural context, accounting for the importance of the Whistonian controversy and Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1753 as backdrops to a novel which does not merely reflect its time, but anticipates subsequent treatments of the institution of marriage in fiction.

Modern scholars have achieved consensus that Frances Burney was writing satire in her novels, acknowledging the range of Burney’s satiric targets and tones, and the merging and submerging of her satire with comedy, irony, melodrama, and sentimentalism. Yet Burney’s contemporary reviewers did not identify Burney as a satirist. In fairness, satire defies easy definition, and the status of satiric fiction when Burney was writing at the end of the eighteenth century was far less secure than at the beginning of the period. Furthermore, satire was gendered as male at the time; women were seen as the targets of satire, not its practitioners. So even when Burney’s reviewers and readers did recognize satiric elements in her work, she was seen as a sentimental novelist, a didactic novelist, a romantic novelist – as anything but a satirist. And Burney did not identify herself as a satirist either. In doing so, Burney was passing – hiding in plain sight as a satirist, defying the conventions of women writers and novelists of her time.

Chapter 2 reveals the frustrating and interminable process of revision for Frances Burney in a survey of all of her novels.Her first two novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), reveal that she submitted to the actual and perceived criticisms of family and friends in ways that diminished her initial innovative aims, including the deletion of a scene containing satanic rites in her Cecilia manuscript.Burney’s last two novels evince a reversal in her revision practices and display her later-in-life tendencies toward verbal excess.Her post-publication revisions to Camilla (1796) show her inability to moderate repetitive characterization and Gothicize her text in the case of the tantalizingly unfinished third edition.As with her changes to later editions of Camilla, Burney’s planned revisions to The Wanderer (1814) were motivated by her dissatisfaction with negative reviews and her unwillingness to relinquish control of her novels.Her final revisions demonstrate her recognition of the never-ending potential of the early novel form.