… Woman in very common Life with fine Cloathes on’ ( Ibid. ) . Few people could have guessed from her demeanour in public how bitingly critical Burney could be in private. She seems to have adopted Chapone’s concept of ‘well-bred … to secretly indulge in a good laugh about other people’s stupidity while maintaining a façade of polite submission in public . Yet women such as Burney , whose social standing was not quite secured in public, had to carefully weigh the consequences of disobliging social superiors . In society, she was therefore always …