Elaine Bander, Dawson College (retired)
Author Biography
Elaine Bander, immediate Past President of The Burney Society (North America), has published many essays on the Burneys and other Georgian writers. Following her retirement from the English Department of Dawson College (Montreal) in 2009, she spent several years as a research assistant at the Burney Centre, 鶹AV. Her essay “‘The Astronomic Muse’: Charles Burney and Astronomy” appeared in the Journal For Eighteenth-Century Studies (volume 44, no. 3, September 2021).
Abstract
Charles Burney, patriarch of the Burney family, wrote hundreds of occasional poems during his long lifetime. While many of these verses celebrate intimate family occasions, others were tactical advances in Burney’s lifelong professional and social upward striving, which reached its apex in the first years of the nineteenth century when three generations of Burney gentlemen – Charles Burney Sr., Charles Burney Jr., and Charles Parr Burney – inscribed their verses into the White Album at Crewe Hall, thereby joining a scribal society of social, political, and cultural elites in offering tribute to their hostess Frances Greville Crewe, a great beauty, wit, aristocratic Whig hostess, and lifelong friend and patroness of Burney. (A misattribution of one of those poems is corrected.)
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