Familiar Violence: Gender and Social Upheaval in the Novels of Frances Burney

Zonitch argues that Burney’s preoccupation with violence originates in her fear that the demise of aristocratic social domination, though freeing women from its systemic abuses, nevertheless exposes them to the less predictable violence of modern life. The author demonstrates that Burney’s novels, each one in dialogue with the others, compose a series whose comprehensive aim is to investigate various modern social “replacements” for aristocratic protection.