Beauty and the Breast: The Poetics of Physical Absence and Narrative Presence in Frances Burney's Mastectomy Letter (1811)

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The chilling account of Burney's mastectomy is given in letter No. 595 and the French medical report, vol. VI, 596–616. The operation took place on 30 September 1811. Her letter was written from March to May 1812. The doctor's report was written on 1 October 1811.

Notes

The chilling account of Burney's mastectomy is given in letter No. 595 and the French medical report, vol. VI, 596–616. The operation took place on 30 September 1811. Her letter was written from March to May 1812. The doctor's report was written on 1 October 1811.

²Important biographies of Burney's life include Hester Davenport's Faithful Handmaid: Frances Burney at the Court of King George III, Clare Harman's Frances Burney: A Biography, Janice Farrar Thaddeus's Frances Burney: A Literary Life, Margaret Anne Doody's Frances Burney: A Life in the Works and Joyce Hemlow's The History of Frances Burney.

³Words like ‘deformed’ and ‘flawed’ are used as references to cultural understandings of disability and femininity and are not to be seen as a reflection of the author's own sensibilities.

⁴Mirzoeff and Fausto Sterling's articles appear in Jennifer Terry and Jaqueline Urla's Deviant Bodies; essays by LaCom and Nussbaum are part of David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder's The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses in Disability.

⁵See also Ruth Perry, ‘Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth Century England’.

⁶For instance, in post-revolutionary France, following Rousseau's dictat to mothers to breast-feed, ‘many French subjects were led to believe that a general social reform would result if mothers fed their own babies’ (Yalom, 75).