The Burney Centre at McGill University brings together archival material on the Burney family from around the world. Its holdings include microfilm, photocopies and scans of the major Burney collections at the Berg Collection (New York Public Library), the British Library and the Beinecke Library (Yale University).
The Centre is dedicated to the publication of complete, definitive scholarly editions of the journals and letters of Frances Burney (1752-1840) and the letters and memoirs of her father, the music historian Dr Charles Burney (1726-1814).
Find out more about the Burney Centre.
News
Burney Society UK 2024 Conference Call for Papers: 'Exploring Burneys'
The Call for Papers for this year's Burney Society conference is now available! The conference, entitled "Exploring Burneys", will be taking place in Greenwich, London between the 13th and 15th of June this summer. The deadline for proposals will be 31 March 2024. Additional information can be found on our Conferences and Events page.
Two Recent Articles from Francesca Saggini
Two recent articles from Francesca Saggini are now available online in open access form. The first article, "Frances Burney: A Houstory", explores the houses that Burney lived in during her lifetime, and considers how Burney's material living conditions might have shaped her writing. This article, published in the European Romantic Review, can be accessed here. The second article (awaiting peer review) is entitled "The wolf, the lamb, and the big “Oh!”: voids, (w)holes, and epitaphic emptiness in Frances Burney’s Hubert de Vere", and examines the character of Cerulia within Burney's unpublished play Hubert de Vere. This research is part of the Horizon 2020 project called "Opening Romanticism: Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences" (OpeRaNew) ID 892230 within the ERC programme Horizon 2020 MSCA-IF-2019. The PI is Francesca Saggini. See CORDIS website at https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/892230. This article can be accessed here through Open Research Europe. The below videos provide a few key highlights from each article:
New Publication Announcements
We are happy to announce two new publications that will be of interest to Burney scholars. The first is Barbara de Boinville's At the Center of the Circle: Harriet de Boinville (1773-1847) and the Writers She Influenced During Europe's Revolutionary Era, available now through New Academia Publishing. This book is the first-ever published biography of Harriet de Boinville, who was a friend and correspondent of Frances Burney.
The second publication is Svetlana Kochkina's Frances Burney's "Evelina": The Book, its History, and its Paratext, available through Palgrave Macmillan. The book compiles Svetlana's excellent work on the publication history of Evelina, from its first edition in 1778 to the present. Svetlana is currently the Head of Lending and Access Services at McGill's Humanities and Social Sciences Library, and has been working closely with the Burney Collection held by McGill's Rare Books and Special Collections.
New Article: "'The Astronomic Muse': Charles Burney and Astronomy" by Elaine Bander
Elaine Bander's new article has been published in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, with research conducted here at the Burney Centre. You can access the article here.
Article on Reading with Austen
McGill News Alumni Magazine interviewed the Burney Centre's Dr Peter Sabor and former RwA Project Manager Catherine Nygren about Reading with Austen. Read the article here.
Image information:
Fanny Burney, by Edward Francisco Burney, at the National Portrait Gallery
Charles Burney, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, at the National Portrait Gallery
For more information about using this image or its sources:
National Portrait Gallery Creative Commons Licence
