Frances Burney's Evelina

I'm listening to Evelina on Librivox and it's making my really happy. The reader has a weird fake British accent which I don't understand (I don't understand why she's doing it, anyway—when she announces her name and the Librivox stuff at the beginning, she does it in a convincingly American accent), but other than that it's really fun. Evelina is kind of a total bitch—smart, critical, funny—but also scared and shy and making enough mistakes that her judgments don't strike me as bitchy so much as really, really fun. That is, Evelina doesn't know how out of place she is, which means that her criticisms aren't nearly as nasty as they really should register. And Burney's SO GOOD at putting in really appalling characters—Evelina's embarrassing French grandmother Mme Duval, Captain Mervin, Clement Willoughby are all terrible, terrible people who say ridiculous petty shit ALL THE TIME and behave badly and pick fights really appalling fights with each other. And then, the best part, Evelina's describing all this shit in letters to her guardian, who's even more socially clueless than she is (that is, more out of the loop of fashion—he's a much better judge of character than she is, but his letters haven't been in the narrative a while, so I tend to forget it), so it never feels as gossippy and bitchy as it properly is. Good job, Burney. She's created the perfect critical epistolary narrator without making her vulnerable to being called rude or impertinent.