| Summary: | In this essay, I wish to study Frances Burneys theorization of history in her preface to The Wanderer, and her choice to frame Juliets representation through narrative deferrals and silences as the means through which this guiding aesthetic principle illuminates the novels consideration of an ethics of reading. I specifically argue that Burneys particular imagining of history and reading is encoded within her representation of Juliets shifting racial presence in the novel. By invoking an ethics of reading, I would like to suggest that however permeable and changeable Juliets skin color becomes in the text, her representation becomes a site from which readers could encounter and respond to migrant figures circulating the Atlantic world, and that Burney carefully narrates an array of responses to Juliet through the voices of other characters in the novel. Finally, I argue that Juliets entrance in the novel as (seemingly) a francophone black woman would seem to reference the emergence of the first black republic, Haiti, in 1804 at the conclusion of the slave revolution in the French colony of St. Domingue, an event Juliets entrance appears to obliquely dwell on.
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