Turning from Edgeworth's pseudojournalistic fiction, this chapter explores how Frances Burney's acute self- consciousness as a woman novelist prompted her to rely on coded forms of visuality for rhetorical liberation. In her journal entries and courtship novels, she deployed type, surface and convention to depict the ways in which propriety of vision and the constraints on verbal expression affected women's lives. Her first and last novels – Evelina: or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778) and The Wanderer; or, FEMALE DIFFICULTIES (1814) – demonstrate that her visual technique remained largely consistent throughout her lifetime. Burney's distinct reliance on typology underscores the need for women to deflect the gaze in order to preserve their appearances from the irreparable consequences of misinterpretation. Although attacks on female modesty and encounters with prostitutes populate her fiction, her heroines ultimately evade the perpetual threat of patriarchal abuse through good sense, fortune and sympathy. After subjecting them to a sequence of reputation- threatening trials, she allows them to be rescued by scopic understanding, which links the Romantic conception of human sympathy to the Third Earl of Shaftesbury's theory of ‘social affection’, or the philosophy that ‘natural’ goodness is that which benefits the ‘Nature’ of the social system of which one is a part. In epistolary form and third- person prose, Burney moves between public and private spaces in order to question the correlation between the appearance and the essence. While Burney is conventional in praising authenticity over fakery and modest looks over penetrating gazes, her novels, like those of Radcliffe and Edgeworth, actually highlight women's need to hide, paint, dissemble and look critically.

After surveying Burney's visual technique in relation to the dominant thematic concerns in recent scholarship, this study considers the manner in which the novelist's anxiety about her critical and social receptions heightened her self- consciousness and influenced her self- expression in literature and in life. As Gina Campbell contends, a woman's determination to publish a text ‘undermined her moral authority’ and modesty. Burney's overt preoccupation with her ‘image’ and reputation made her particularly attentive to the strictures on language when depicting the interplay of character in her novels.