With 4,000 copies of Camilla selling out in just three months in the summer of 1796, Frances Burney earned a sum which ‘was the greatest which at that time had ever been received for a novel’ (Macaulay 1854, 408), an amount so extraordinary that it gave her and her husband the means to build the house that came to be known as ‘Camilla Cottage’. The impressive subscription list affixed to the novel contains several names of writers considered today as essential to the development of the genre such as those of Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth or Jane Austen, whose name first appeared in print on this occasion (Barchas 2012, 141). Although Camilla was bound to be met with mild disappointment after the sensational acclaim received by Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782) and garnered mixed reviews, critics found much to applaud in it. Burney's dazzling reputation established her as a touchstone and emboldened aspiring novelists to model themselves on her example; according to contemporary reviewers, it urged emulators to ‘imagine [themselves] a Burney’ or walk ‘in the footsteps of Miss Burney’.

The heroine's horrifying vision in Book X, Chapter X, is one of the most memorable passages of Camilla. While this chapter does not primarily aim to analyse Camilla's nightmare, since it has already been thoroughly dissected by distinguished scholars, it relies upon previous research, notably Julia Epstein's argument that this episode provides ‘a paradigm for the vocal structure of female literature’, to examine its influence on the representation of oneiric experience in Julia de Vienne by an anonymous novelist and Tales of Fancy by Sarah Harriet Burney, Frances Burney's half-sister (Epstein 1989, 123). More specifically, this chapter argues that in these mostly forgotten books the topos of the dream is a site of resistance where women's voices fight repression through the questioning of genres and writing practices. As a narrative strategy, the dream produces a socially acceptable framework within the conventions of the novel in which to express and denounce painful experiences of frustration. In her discussion of Camilla's dream, Margaret Anne Doody contends that