The action of Fanny Burney's vast collections of journals and letters, like that of most women's writing in her century, derives from her attempt to defend—not to discover, define, or assert—the self. Both her choices and her ways of describing them testify to her productive and self-protective solution to unescapable problems of women's existence. That solution provides psychic space for her imaginative life, thus making her literary career possible, and also shapes the operations of her imagination.(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976. 160).
And it works so well for other kinds of fictionalized women's writing in the 18th century: Pamela as an attempt to defend the self; Evelina, certainly. The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph isn't about threat and defense, though, so much as avoidance of potential misfortune, and then the failure of that avoidance and bad things happening. So I'm saying there's a difference between SAVING YOURSELF from something and TRYING TO KEEP SOMETHING BAD FROM HAPPENING to you. I think.
