Time & Perspective Quote by Frances Burney

Burney is drawing a line in the sand between the cheap thrill of the implausible and the deeper pleasure of fiction that feels like life, even when it’s polished. Her standard isn’t documentary realism; it’s credibility. She wants an “appearance of truth” and, failing that, at least “possibility” - a minimum dose of the real that lets readers surrender without rolling their eyes. It’s a shrewd readerly psychology: belief isn’t binary, it’s negotiated, and the novel’s job is to keep the negotiation from becoming work.

The balancing act she sketches is basically the 18th-century novel learning its power. “History” here means narrative - plot as lived experience - which must be “natural,” while “sentiments” can be “refined.” In other words: elevate the emotional and moral texture, but don’t float the story off the ground. Burney is making room for heightened feeling (a hallmark of her era’s sensibility) without excusing melodrama. She’ll allow artifice in the heart, not in the bones.

Her last clause is the real flex: characters should be “probable,” even if their behavior is “excelling.” That’s a defense of exceptional people written as recognizably human, not as cardboard heroes. The subtext is aesthetic and ethical at once: fiction should improve us by presenting models of virtue, wit, or resilience, but it can’t preach from a universe that doesn’t resemble our own. Burney is protecting the novel from both gossip-level triviality and fairy-tale convenience, insisting it earn its intensity.