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"Cecilia; Or, Memoirs of an Heiress — Volume 1" by Fanny Burney is a novel published in 1782. Twenty-year-old Cecilia Beverley inherits a fortune with one condition: her future husband must take her surname. Navigating London society under the care of three flawed guardians, she encounters fortune hunters, schemers, and social pretenders. As she struggles between duty and desire, a mysterious white domino at a masquerade captures her attention, leading to unexpected complications in her carefully constrained world. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

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“Fanny's Cecilia came out last summer, and is as much liked and read, I believe, as any book ever was,” wrote Charlotte Burney in Jan. 1783. “She had 250 pounds for it from Payne and Cadell. Most people say she ought to have had a thousand. It is now going into the third edition, though Payne owns that they printed two thousand at the first edition, and Lowndes told me five hundred was the common number for a novel.” [Footnote: _The Early Diary of Frances Burney, with a selection from her correspondence, and from the journals of her sisters Susan and Charlotte Burney._ Edited by Annie Raine Ellis. 1889. Vol. II. p. 307.]

The manuscript of _Cecilia_ was submitted to Dr Burney and Mr Crisp during its composition, and their suggestions were in some cases adopted, as we learn from the _Diary_. Dr Johnson was not consulted, but a desire at once to imitate and to please him evidently controlled the work.

Under these circumstances it is naturally less fresh and spontaneous than _Evelina_, but it is more mature. The touch is surer and the plot more elaborate. We cannot to-day fully appreciate the “conflict scene between mother and son,” for which, Miss Burney tells us, the book was written; but the pictures of eighteenth century affectations are all alive, and the story is thoroughly absorbing, except, perhaps, in the last book.

Miss Burney often took the name of her characters from her acquaintances, and it seems probable that some of the “types” in _Cecilia_ are also drawn from real life. The title of Miss Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ was borrowed from _Cecilia_, and som

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