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I did not love Evelina as much the third time around. Also, it's been a number of years since I read it, and I think my tastes and level of tolerance has changed a little. This is a really, really long book, and though I enjoyed the last section, where Evelina and Lord Orville (who is honestly a little too idealized) actually get a chance at figuring each other out, my patience ran thin for all of the horrible people Evelina has to hang out with. The main thing I came away with was pity for the helplessness of young women back in the day. And even though Evelina is a person of sense and good judgment, she has to hide it most of the time in order to be polite. I'm not saying we don't do something similar nowadays, but the language of excessive decorum got a little tiring. And then it swung to the other extreme of spending way too much time on scenes where vulgar people are making mischief. There was hardly anybody ever talking sense. Even Evelina's guardian, who is supposed to be the ultimate voice of reason, mostly just talks about how he is looking forward to dying in her arms. I have to wonder, was all this kind of thing common in letter-writing and speech of the day? Or is it an exaggerated reality that people were supposed to aspire to?
As a reader, I always felt like Evelina was a bit of an enigma to me, in spite of the fact that nearly all of the hundreds of letters were written by her. I think it's because, though she is describing what happens to her in society, one gets the sense that she never really participates in it. Mostly she just watches and then feels appropriately disturbed or contented. No doubt she was seen as a paragon of womanly virtue at the time of publication, but it's hard to read without feeling the injustice of it.
It is interesting to view this as a prototype of women's literature. Jane Austen's novels, which came a few decades later, show society as still a mix of posh and crass, but with more of an insistence that there is a middle ground, and her heroines, while still polite, are less afraid to express their thoughts in conversation. She has also nicely pared down her dialogue and descriptions, so that they are not nearly as high-flown as Mrs. Burney's.