The history of Fanny Burney
Frances Burney was an 18th century English novelist, diarist, and playwright, with four novels, eight plays, one biography, and twenty-five volumes of journals and letters published. Her work foreshadowed such novelists of manners with a satirical bent as Austen and Thackeray. Her first novel, Evelina, was published anonymously in 1778, as young women of a certain social status were discouraged from reading novels -- writing one was out of the question. It brought Burney almost immediate fame with its unique narrative and comic strengths. She followed it with Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814). All Burney's novels explore the lives of English aristocrats and satirize their social pretensions and personal foibles, with an eye to larger questions such as the politics of female identity. Although her novels were hugely popular during her lifetime, Burney's reputation as a writer of fiction suffered after her death at the hands of biographers and critics, who felt that the extensive diaries, published posthumously in 1842-1846, offer a more interesting and accurate portrait of 18th-century life. Today critics are returning to her novels and plays with renewed interest in her outlook on the social lives and struggles of women in a predominantly male-oriented culture.
Print Book, English, ©1958
The Clarendon Press, Oxford, ©1958