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** spoiler alert ** Cecilia Beverly is a young orphan whose relatives left her with a large fortune, three quarelling trustees, and a mind of unsurpassed delicacy and gentility. The first volume is set during the tumultuous time Cecilia spent with one trustee, who "borrows" huge sums of money from her and eventually kills himself to avoid his debts. Cecilia moves back the country, but her Love Interest, a man of good character but very proud parents, follows her there and begs her to marry him. ALAS! According to her uncle's will, whoever marries Cecilia must either take her surname or relinquish her vast fortune. Since neither is acceptable to either Cecilia or the man who is supposedly desperately in love with her, they languish apart for a year or so. Eventually, the Love Interest's mother agrees to allow a secret marriage, and in exchange Cecilia will give up all her money. Cecilia agrees, they are married in the most hurried, unexciting ceremony in literary history (it takes less than a paragraph to describe the entire wedding of two characters who have spent ~900 pages pining for each other), and then Love Interest gallops off to France. (He'd shot a man, again described singularly bloodlessly, and needed to escape the law.) Love Interest returns, accuses Cecilia of betraying him, Cecilia goes mad, Love Interest feels guilty, Love Interest's proud parents feel guilty, Cecilia magically regains her senses and everyone forgives each other. Cecilia and Love Interest live happily ever after, especially after another relative, never before mentioned, decides to give them a fortune to replace the one Cecilia gave up.

This was an infuriating book. Entire plots are forgotten about (what about the lawsuit against Cecilia? Doesn't Love Interest ever get in trouble for shooting Monckton?) and a dozen characters exist only to provide "comic" relief and cautionary tales. Cecilia and Devile are witty characters with a wealth of common sense until they fall in love, at which point the book rapidly devolves into a laughable melodrama.

Here's a randomly chosen sample of Burney's style, complete with sixteen commas in a single sentence: "As she was no longer, as hitherto, repairing to a temporary habitation, which at pleasure she might quit, and to which, at a certain period, she could have no possible claim, but to a house which was her own for ever, or, at least, could solely by her own choice be transferred, she determined, as much as was in her power, in quitting her desultory dwellings, to empty her mind of the transactions which had passed in them, and upon entering a house where she was permanently to reside, to make the expulsion of her past sorrows, the basis upon which to establish her future serenity." Holy crap.