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Rating: 
Summary: Review of Cecilia
Review: Any 18th century novel of manners can make Emily Post seem coarse and rude. The heroine of this novel so high minded and refined that she can only go from a bad situation to a worse one. It was, for this reason, a bit painful to read. This novel is 941 pages long, but it is not boring. The author is a master of the form and can sustain the reader. As an 18th century novel, it is full of information on the way people lived in those days. The author, Frances Burney, has a gift with prose styles and dialects, so that one could easily imagine how people spoke and gestured to each other. Cecilia is a hopeful love story of a young heiress who risks everything for love. The novel resembles the style of novel Jane Austen wrote, but is much more complex and displays much more learning and worldliness because its author, Frances Burney, was much more worldly and learned than Jane Austen. It is too bad that this author is not better known.
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Summary: Money and Love
Review: As a fan of Jane Austen, and now Fanny Burney, I had high expectations for this novel. The only reason why I don't give it 5 stars is that it wasn't my favorite Burney novel....and I was expecting a pure love story. The love story part of the book is good, but it is not as satisfying as the deep romance between Lizzie Bennet and Mr. Darcy... or even that of Camilla and Edgar in Burney's Camilla. However, the plot is very interesting as it taught me a lot about money in this time period (making other novels of this time more easily understood). The footnotes in this edition, while frequent, are very helpful and informative. I finally have some grasp of the value of each type of coin that is mentioned in all of these types of novels. And MONEY is central to this book, more so than love, I think. It is a story about those who have it, those who want it, those who steal it, those who abuse it, and those who are willing to give it all away. This is all very interesting and tied up with a love story, but don't expect it to be a pure romance like Camilla. It is a great novel, but for a change, Burney decides not to give her readers the perfect sweet and sappy plot that we take for granted.
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Summary: A source for Jane Austen
Review: How many readers know that Jane Austen's title "Pride and Prejudice" is actually a quotation from Fanny Burney's "Cecilia"? Perhaps Austen even meant her readers to read her novel in the light of the earlier one. "Cecilia" is interesting, a novel about a man and woman both of whom need to unbend to come together. It reflects well the interest in moral and psychological intensity in its time and helps dispel the notion that women writers were not taken seriously in their time. This is a once-a-decade read but well worth the effort.
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Summary: Great Read
Review: I read this novel some 6-7 years ago, after I read Evelina and simply loved it. I loved Cecilia even more. It is true that it is a very long novel but it is very much worth your time. It is about an heiress who will inherit a large amount of money on the condition that the man who marries her will take her surname. She is put under the care of three different people, who represent three different characters. One is a miser, the other is a spendthrift and the third one is: well I don't actually remember the third one. But her emotions regarding the man she is in love with but cannot marry because his proud family will never consent to let him drop his surname,the pain they both feel ... Very very good novel. I couldn't keep from crying in the end.
Rating:
Summary: Very enjoyable despite length
Review: My mom bought this book at a garage sale for very cheap once almost as a joke, because it was so long. I made several attempts to start reading it, all of which failed, until I finally managed to get stuck in. Then I read it fanatically to the end. It was thrilling! All those amazingly overdrawn characters, how about the "parsimonious" Mr Briggs, not to mention the confusing Mrs Delvile (I imagine it's pronounced "Delville"?
It's all very melodramatic, with an attempted suicide, a real suicide, a carriage-crash (or whatever they called them), and the heroine even goes mad at one point (I thought that was completely unlikely - she'd seemed fairly sane before that)! Who said ladies in the old days spent all their time doing embroidery?
One really got a sense of pity toward the poor girl - I thought the whole point of the novel was that she was surrounded by all these very different charcters, none of whom actually seemed to dislikeher, and yet she had absolutely no-one to trust or rely on - she was completely alone in the world (maybe it isn't so surprising she went mad).
All in all a 'corking good read.' You forget the length when you really get into it.
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Summary: Why isn't Fanny Burney famous?
Review: Oh what a treat! Don't be dismayed by the length, this is delightful! Unlike most authors of long fiction, Burney actually manages to stay on task and not wander into thoughts of war and whatever. This book is 941 pages because 941 pages of things happen. This is the story of Cecilia, a young heiress from the country. When her family dies she is left with three guardians: the proud Mr. Delvile, the miserly Mr. Briggs, and the husband of her childhood friend, Mr. Harrel. She moves in with the Harrels and is escorted into the London high life - parties, visiting, the opera, and scores of gentleman anxious to make the acquaintence of a beautiful heiress. Cecilia is not impressed. The commentary on 18th Century London life is scathing - and remarkably apropos to modern life as well. One night at a masquerade ball she is saved from the devil, or a partier dressed as such, by a charming man in a domino, the first real person Cecilia has met. He knows who she is, where she comes from, and who her guardians are, but Cecilia cannot even discover his name. At the end of the evening he disappears, but the seeds of love are planted - if only Cecilia knew who he was! Thoughts of her new acquaintence are interrupted though, as she realizes that the Harrels are quickly going in to more debt than they will every be able to pay off, and their party train is not slowing down for the emminent crash to come. The most amazing thing about this book is how modern it is. Though set in the late 18th century, the problems and scenarios transfer easily into our modern conscious. One of the central issues in the novel is that Cecilia will lose her inheritance if whoever she marries does not take her last name. Have we as a society yet gotten over this? Not by a long shot. The descriptions of the different characters are as funny as they are scathing - yet these gossips, fortune-hunters, scatter-brains, and denialists still fill our world today (I'm the scatter-brain). As the book progresses it moves more from satire and into soap opera (hence my final decision to give it 4 not 5 stars). It becomes less intelligent, but no less engaging as a roller coaster of twists and turns are thrown in the path of Cecilia and her desire for her one true love.
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Summary: Burney's Best
Review: The first book i read by this authour was Evelina and I decided when i finished it that it was definetly the best book she wrote (even though i hadn't read any other book by her then) but my mind surely changed after I read this absolutley AWESOME book Cecilia!! I would recomened this book to people who liked her other books and who adore Jane Austen's.
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Summary: My favorite Burney!
Review: This is my favorite of Burney's works, because the heroine has a mind of her own, and Burney doesn't insist that we feel sorry for her the entire novel.
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