“Spilling the Beans: Eating and Authorship in Burney’s Early Journals”

This essay argues that the descriptions of food and eating in Frances Burney's early journals relate explicitly to debates about women as literal and metaphorical consumers and producers in the late eighteenth century, showing how Burney relates the consumption of food to the production of text. The author is concerned not with what Burney ate or did not eat, but with how she presents eating and abstinence as an integral part of her professional and social identities. The author interprets eating, and particularly describing oneself eating, as an intrinsically performative act, and explores some of the ways in which this theme complicates readings of Burney's early celebrity.