Frances Burney, Mme d’Arblay (1752-1840) [ Art and Literature ]
… subjects or pursuits of interest, ambition, or literature, that can enlist either imagination or instruction into conversation’. 1 However, by the early nineteenth century, all that had long changed, Burney insisted. The Enlightenment had successfully illuminated even the most rural areas, with the help of two basic sociable tools: conversation and the press. The tide of ignorance is turned; and not there alone, nor alone in any other small town, but … she did not dare name novels. Imagination, however, was as important as instruction : both, to her, served to enliven conversation and encouraged polite forms of sociability that reached right into the privacy of the home, whether in the …
Fiction | Masquerade | Memoirs | Theatre | Women
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