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Bodily Matters: Creative Agency in Frances Burney’s Life Writing

ABSTRACT Frances Burney has a rich and extensive collection of life writing consisting of conventional letters and diaries as well as “journal letters,” documents Burney wrote over a span of several days or even weeks and circulated among friends and relations. In this writing, Burney recounts anecdotes, describes her current writing projects, and shares intimate details of her life. However, Burney also writes explicitly about her body, describing its vulnerabilities and disruptions, and detailing how it is imperiled by others. This concern with describing the experience of intense physical discomfort and pain is common in her life writing. In this essay, I explore how Burney copes with the disruptive materiality of her body by crafting a vividly detailed discourse of her body in pain. I draw on theoretical work from Lois McNay and Elaine Scarry to create a theory of agency in Burney’s letter writing that is founded upon the experience of articulating bodily pain through the vehicle of the letter. I argue that Burney uses her life writing to enact an active and creative resistance against a hostile world by sharing her experiences of pain with her reader, creating a generative agency from the material inscription of feminine embodiment.