Burney’s cutting edge goal right here was once ‘to draw an outstanding, yet now not an ideal personality; I intended . . . to mixture upon paper, as i've got usually obvious mixed in existence, noble and infrequent traits with amazing and incurable defects’. 32 a part of Mrs Delvile’s ‘greatness’ is her means for ethical subtlety and enterprise precept. so much in demand between her defects is her readiness, as Cecilia places it, ‘to sacrifice to her experience of responsibility the happiness of a son’ (701), the place ‘duty’ capacity the obdurate upholding of patriarchal conference. regardless of her love and admiration for Cecilia, Mrs Delvile insists that carrying on with the relations identify (her husband’s, after all, instead of her personal) take priority over marriage for romance – or, when it comes to Cecilia and Mortimer, love and fortune. Burney’s technical originality – the authentically combined personality, and the compromised instead of unmitigatedly chuffed finishing, ‘more based on genuine existence’ – exposes the actualities which endure down on individuals’, and especially women’s, freedom of selection. Cecilia chooses protection and private happiness, however the rate is independence, the woman’s sacrifice of brand name and fortune as she enters her husband’s relations. It used to be Cecilia that the Monthly’s reviewer defined as ‘related in a method exceptionally worried and perspicuous’. The remark helpfully captures Burney’s different significant innovation: the versatile narrative voice wherein she lines her heroine’s frequently anguished engagement with a predatory and unpredictable international. The compliment for Burney’s stylistic lucidity and readability in ‘perspicuous’ is easy sufficient, yet ‘nervous’ at this era can be utilized both within the now out of date experience of a method ‘vigorous, strong, forcible’ (OED), or with the emergent meanings linked to the frightened procedure and used in the language of sensibility to indicate specific sensitivity of temperament. Burney’s sinuous third-person narrative importantly combines the 2, guiding the reader via Cecilia’s lively ethical notion methods as she struggles to make feel of her stories. Burney’s heroine screens that perfect conjunction of cause with feeling which Mary Wollstonecraft might later have fun as ‘active sensibility’, and the radical establishes the interior lifetime of its lady protagonist because the concentration of either curiosity and which means. 33 The passage partly quoted above, within which Cecilia ninety two Frances Burney describes to herself the ‘opulence, hospitality, and splendour’ of London society, is commonplace: but, in her critical reflections, she couldn't yet imagine herself surprisingly unlucky that the mum or dad with whom by myself it appeared right for her to stay, may still through parsimony, vulgarity, and meanness, render riches contemptible, prosperity unavailing, and œconomy odious . . . in a urban abounding with opulence, hospitality, and splendour, and of which the critical population, lengthy eminent for his or her wealth and their probity, have been now nearly universally emerging in splendor and liberality. (374) This strikes from directive third-person narration of Cecilia’s proposal methods to an unmediated illustration of the enthusiastic phrases she herself could use.