Frances Burney published Evelina anonymously but to great acclaim at the age of 25. Born in 1752, she was the third child and second daughter of Charles Burney, a composer and scholar specializing in the history of music; Burney might in fact be called the world’s first musicologist. The Burneys lived in London in artistic and intellectual circles overlapping those of Samuel Johnson; David Garrick the actor, Phillip Barry the painter, Joseph Nollekens the sculptor were part of Burney’s acquaintance.
As the second girl, however, Frances Burney was literally self‐educated: unlike older and younger siblings she was never sent to school except briefly after the death of her mother, which occurred when she was 9 years old. Five years later Charles Burney remarried, to a wealthy widow with three children of her own, creating a large blended family, outwardly happy but with massive tensions, particularly between Frances and her stepmother. Dyslexic as a child, Frances did not know the letters of the alphabet at 8, but at 10 she began writing “scribblings” to herself almost continuously; reading actually came later. Her serious writing began with a journal that she began in 1768, at 15, and kept until her death in 1840. The journal begins: “To whom dare I reveal my private opinion of my nearest relations? My secret thoughts of my dearest friends? My own hopes, fears, reflections, and dislikes! – Nobody. To NOBODY, then, will I write my journal, since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved.” Material from her journal was often turned into letters she sent to Samuel (“Daddy”) Crisp, a wealthy friend of Charles Burney whose country house served as a frequent retreat for Burney, where she could write without interference from her elders. And material from the letters found its way into Burney’s first novel – especially the early letters in which Evelina reports to her guardian Arthur Villars about the theatre, the opera, and other public entertainment venues in London.
Evelina was the product of at least three years of secret labor: it was written in secret because the second Mrs. Burney disapproved of women writers, and once written it was copied in a disguised hand. Frances was her father’s amanuensis, his books went to the publishers in her handwriting, and she was afraid that the novel would be attributed to him. She attempted to sell the book when it was about half finished to John Murray, the most prestigious publisher in London, but he declined to bid on part of a novel, so the book came out anonymously with the firm of Thomas Lowndes. Burney’s original preface was even designed to mislead the reader about the author’s sex. It mentions as predecessor novelists “such names as Rousseau, Johnson, Marivaux, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollet,” and continues: “no man need blush at starting from the same post, though many, nay, most men, may sigh at finding themselves distanced.” All these exemplars are male and she uses the word “man” twice in referring obliquely to herself. These measures succeeded: her stepmother read the notice of the publication of Evelina to the Burneys at breakfast without any idea that one of the children was the author. The novel was an instant hit, praised by Samuel Johnson, and read addictively by Edmund Burke, who stayed up all night to finish it.
The somewhat clumsy machinery of Evelina depends, like Tom Jones, on a series of relationships only partly disclosed at the opening of the novel. At the outset we learn that the heroine, whom we know as Evelina Anville, has been raised and educated by the Reverend Arthur Villars at his estate in Dorsetshire. Her mother, Caroline Evelyn, had died giving birth to her, after being repudiated by her husband, Sir John Belmont. The rakish Sir John had married Caroline in a legal private ceremony, but for reasons never coherently explained,1 disavowed the relationship and burned the marriage documents, leaving Evelina with no way of proving her kinship as his legitimate daughter. Caroline Evelyn’s father is also dead; Mr. Evelyn left the guardianship of his grand‐daughter with a small bequest to Villars. Evelina’s grandmother, however, an English tavern‐waitress whom Mr. Evelyn had imprudently married, is very much alive; after Mr. Evelyn’s death, she married a Frenchman named Duval, and after his death she has taken up with a Monsieur Du Bois. As the story begins, Evelina is soon to turn 18, at which point Villars’s guardianship is to lapse, and Madame Duval (as she calls herself) wants to assert her own rights over Evelina and to sue Sir John Belmont, who refuses to recognize Evelina as his natural heir.
What we do not learn until very late in the novel is that Evelina’s wet nurse, Polly Green, had succeeded in palming off her daughter (born six weeks earlier than Evelina) to Sir John Belmont as his own child; Sir John’s imperious resistance to the claims made on behalf of Evelina comes primarily from his reasonable supposition, under the circumstances, that he has already recognized his late wife’s daughter and that Evelina must be an impostor. We also learn that Mr. Macartney – whom we meet as a poor lodger at the London house of Evelina’s vulgar cousins, the Branghtons – is the illegitimate son of Sir John Belmont and thus Evelina’s half‐brother; the two are strangely drawn to each other as kindred spirits. Macartney is passionately in love with the false Miss Belmont, and in deep despair about his passion for her, which he mistakenly thinks incestuous. In the denouement Macartney discovers to his delight that he is able to marry the young woman, whom Sir John designates, at Evelina’s insistence, as co‐heir.
This “back story” to Evelina is thus quintessentially melodramatic, particularly the narrative line of Caroline Evelyn who, rather like Richardson’s Clarissa, is in rebellion against a marriage planned by her mother and stepfather, who elopes with a rake, and then, suddenly repudiated by him, flees to her late father’s mentor Villars, where she bears her child and dies. Frances Burney wrote that melodrama in her early teens but, on the urging of her stepmother, burned it on her fifteenth birthday together with most of the rest of her juvenilia. But Evelina itself, taken apart from the back story, is structured as a narrative comedy based on techniques that Burney learned from reading Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, a complex sequence of action combining a comedy of fulfillment and a comedy of embarrassment. This combination runs through the comic novels of Fielding and Smollett, in which a romantic plot leading to marriage is combined with episodes in which occasionally the protagonists, but more frequently secondary characters, are subjected to shame or embarrassment, including physical pratfalls that fall short of causing permanent injury or death.2
The comedy of fulfillment centers on Evelina’s relationship with Lord Orville, an earl who typifies the Grandisonian ideal of masculinity: proud and firm with his fellow gentlemen, who dare not oppose him, but gentle and compassionate with ladies and inferiors. Lord Orville and Evelina meet early in the novel at a private ball, are instantly attracted to each other, and since there are no serious obstacles of fortune or social station, it is all but inevitable that they will marry in the denouement. This comedy of fulfillment is partially crippled by the perfection of both the heroine and the hero. Evelina makes a few eminently forgivable mistakes because she is inexperienced and ignorant of some of the conventions of London society, owing to her isolated upbringing in the country. In fact it is through such a mistake that she cements her relationship with Lord Orville at a private ball. Having danced with him earlier in the evening, she misleadingly indicates Orville as her current partner in order to get out of dancing with Mr. Lovel, an irritating fop who has been pursuing her; the ever‐gracious Orville indeed leads her to the dance to conceal her fib. Aside from her inexperience and the awkwardness this produces in her, which diminishes as our heroine gains familiarity with the ways of London society, Evelina is entirely perfect – perfectly beautiful and with a loving heart, but perfection, however admirable, is hard to make interesting.
The primary obstacle to her union with Lord Orville is Evelina’s sense of her own unworthiness as an unacknowledged orphan to become his countess, which is removed once Sir John Belmont recognizes her as his legitimate daughter, and which Sir John does as soon as he lays eyes on her without needing any further proof or persuasion, since she is physically the image of her late mother. A secondary obstacle is a sexually suggestive letter that Evelina receives, ostensibly from Lord Orville, in response to a letter of apology from her. Evelina understands the innuendo in the letter quite well, but given his perfect character as she has known it since their first acquaintance, she assumes he must have written it while drunk or otherwise impaired. Evelina’s guardian, Mr. Villars, takes the letter far more seriously than she does and insists that she avoid his society entirely in the future, but though she at first wants only to return to her seclusion in Dorsetshire, she decides to remain where she is and deal with Lord Orville as circumstances dictate. In the course of time it is revealed that the letter was in fact forged by Lord Orville’s unscrupulous rival, Sir Clement Willoughby, a rakish baronet who is the novel’s principal villain.
One should add that we recognize rather than feel Lord Orville’s passion for Evelina, since the point of view stays almost exclusively with the heroine, and since a perfect gentleman such as Lord Orville can speak his love for her only when he is about to propose marriage. Sexual passion is an arena of life only tepidly rendered by Burney, although she makes a heroic attempt to dramatize Lord Orville’s love through episodes in volume III where his jealousy and suspicion are provoked by Evelina’s clandestine meetings with Macartney, meetings which she cannot honorably explain without giving away information about the latter’s parentage and history that she is not licensed to tell. The novel primarily tests Orville’s devotion by secondary obstacles: malicious or foolish gentlemen who attempt to captivate or take advantage of Evelina, against whom Lord Orville must defend her, or Evelina’s own vulgar and pretentious relatives, whose antics Lord Orville must indulge.
The comedy of fulfillment is reinforced by a growth of sorts within Evelina herself. Although she is presented as perfect, she is inexperienced, and while her natural judgment and intelligence are constant throughout the novel, her lack of knowledge of the ways of the world makes her passive and timid in resisting the claims of others. As she acquires experience, she becomes more confident in her own judgment. The growth is slow, but her movement toward independence is shown in volume III by the way she thinks through her resistance to her guardian’s demand that she shun the society of Lord Orville. Insipid as it is most of the time, the comedy of fulfillment gives the basic structure to the novel, while the texture is filled in with episodes of the comedy of embarrassment.
The comedy of embarrassment in turn takes two forms: episodes in which Evelina is herself embarrassed, primarily owing to mistakes of inexperience or to the overweening behavior of her vulgar relatives, and episodes in which others – including some of those vulgar relatives – are embarrassed owing to the cruelty of some of the malicious characters who populate the novel. These are episodes in the strict sense that any one of them could be omitted without disturbing the flow of the novel. But there is a rhythm to the episodes that Burney has carefully modulated: minor episodes of embarrassment or danger to Evelina lead up to a climactic episode in each volume.
In the first volume, the climactic episode is the night at the opera, in letter XXI, opened by the vulgar behavior of the Branghtons (who pay for “nosebleed” seats in the gallery and then try to sneak into more expensive areas of the opera house). After the opera, a deluge of rain has begun and the party has difficulty getting a hackney coach to take them home. Evelina separates herself from her party, who are embarrassing her further by their incompetence and stinginess, only to run into Sir Clement Willoughby, and then into Lord Orville. Orville offers to take Evelina home in his coach, but Sir Clement maneuvers to get her into his own carriage and drives off with her. His flirtatious talk both annoys and distracts Evelina temporarily, but she soon realizes that they are not heading in the direction of her hostess Lady Howard’s house in Queen Anne Street, and that (like Harriet Byron in the coach of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen in Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison) she is being abducted. She immediately makes an outcry, and Sir Clement – who is an opportunist more than a real villain – soon gets the coachman to turn around and take Evelina home, where she finds both Lady Howard and Lord Orville waiting expectantly for her.
Perhaps the most intricate of the episodes in which Evelina is herself the victim is the last one of volume 2 (letter XXI), which recounts her visit, together with her grandmother’s vulgar party, to “Marybone” [Marylebone Gardens], where a fireworks display, with sparks landing near her group of ladies, sends the group scattering, with Evelina outdistancing her party. Isolated in the dark walkways of the park, she is accosted by an officer, who takes her for one of the prostitutes who ply their trade there, and who attempts to “enlist” her into his “service.” Tearing herself away from him, she approaches two women for protection, who readily agree to let her walk between them, but Evelina soon realizes that she is walking with a pair of whores, and, a moment later, recognizes Lord Orville himself walking in their direction and realizes she has been seen in their unspeakable company. She extricates herself when she finds her party, but the whores harass her group for what remains of the evening, and Evelina has the further mortification of a morning call by Lord Orville the following day, in which he asks “whether those ladies with whom I saw you last night” were ever “in your company before?” But of course just as her faux pas at the private ball led to her first acquaintance with Lord Orville, his admittedly officious attempt to warn her about the dangerous company she had blundered into leads to an apology on his part and to greater intimacy between them: Evelina feels “delight and gratitude” and Lord Orville kisses her hand as he takes his leave.
We would expect a proposal scene to quickly follow, but further delay is caused by a sexually suggestive letter sent to Evelina, a letter forged by Sir Clement Willoughby under Lord Orville’s name. The letter is quite obviously out of character, even to Evelina, and all that should be required to expose it would be to show it to Lord Orville. Instead of doing so, Evelina becomes ill and returns to Berry Hill, after which the narrative shifts to a spa near Bristol, where Evelina has been sent to recuperate, and where, upon meeting Lord Orville again, she immediately forgives him as soon as she is exposed to his usual gracious manners. At Bristol Hot Wells, where volume III takes place, Evelina is no longer exposed to her vulgar relations or to the dangers of London pleasure resorts. Her somewhat attenuated embarrassments here are primarily caused by her complicated relationship with Mr. Macartney, who has pursued her to Bristol and confided in her. Honor requires her silence but she is highly uncomfortable hiding her relationships and activities from Lord Orville.
Evelina is by no means the only butt of the comedy of embarrassment, though. Burney moves into the brutal orbit of Smollett as she subjects her minor characters to malicious practical jokes.3 Evelina’s grandmother, Madame Duval, is the principal target of these pranks. In volume I the patriotic Captain Mirvan, who hates the French, arranges matters so that, when Monsieur Du Bois is carrying Madame Duval over a sodden stretch of pavement, Du Bois slips and falls so that both of them are covered in deep mud. In volume II, at Lady Howard’s country estate of Howard Grove, Captain Mirvan, this time with the assistance of Sir Clement Willoughby, stages in disguise a robbery of Madame Duval’s coach, leaving the elderly woman tied up in a ditch:
In the third volume, the vulgar Branghtons and their middle‐class acquaintances are absent, and their places as objects of satire are taken by young gentlemen and women of fashion, who in their own way behave as contemptibly as the middle‐class characters in the earlier volumes. The forceful but ridiculous Madame Duval, who wants to aggressively pursue Evelina’s parental rights, is replaced by the equally forceful but admirable Mrs. Selwyn, an unofficial guardian for Evelina who shames the fashionistas and succeeds in getting the audience with Sir John Belmont that leads to the denouement. The most vivid Smollett moment in this volume is a race staged by Lord Merton and Mr. Coverley; to settle a bet between them, two women over eighty years of age, sponsored by the two aristocrats, are to run a foot race, in a vivid scene today’s reader may find hard to stomach:
The conclusion of the novel features a final practical joke by Captain Mirvan, who introduces a monkey, dressed to the nines, into the assembled genteel company: Mr. Lovel the fop takes it, correctly, as a satirical jab at him personally. Afraid to challenge Mirvan himself, Lovel deals a furious blow to the monkey, who grabs Lovel around the neck and “fastens his teeth to one of his ears.” The other gentlemen are too frightened or indolent to interfere, and it is Lord Orville who restores order by detaching the monkey from his prey and evicting it from the room.
Burney is by most standards the most important female English novelist before Jane Austen, and her novels tell us a great deal about women’s place in the late Enlightenment, and what a ferociously intelligent but by no means independent woman was able to think and say about it at that time. Obviously and most important, women at this time were dependent upon men: they legally belonged to their fathers until they were married and to their husbands afterwards. It was not until 1870 that married women could own property in their own names.4 The few women in Evelina whom we see acting independently – Lady Howard, Madame Duval, and Mrs. Selwyn – are all widows. The goal of almost every daughter – and we see this most clearly in the brash Branghton girls – was to attract a man and become his wife, so that she could at least run her own household; remaining a daughter, being an old maid, was theoretically the worst of fates. But to become a wife was not necessarily to live in paradise. Burney portrays Lady Howard’s daughter Mrs. Mirvan as endlessly striving, not always successfully, to appease her “surly, vulgar, and disagreeable” husband, to divert him out of an angry mood into good humor, and the reader has a sense that her life may be at its most pleasant when Captain Mirvan is on one of his voyages.
For her own part, Burney was not one to rush into marriage as soon as the opportunity arose: she received and rejected a proposal in the summer of 1775 from one Thomas Barlow. In her diaries she recorded that she was “too spoilt by such men as my father and Mr. Crisp to content myself with a character merely in‐offensive. I should expire with fatigue of him.” But though they eventually acceded to her decision, neither Daddy Crisp nor her father were happy about it: Charles Burney might die, he pointed out, leaving her unprotected and unprovided for. According to Judith Newton, marriage was not merely a market but a buyer’s market, and men were the buyers: “Women outnumbered men. Men were marrying late, and when they did marry, men were likely to require a dowry. Add to this the legal subordination of wife to husband and it is clear that the fate of the middle‐class woman was bound to a relationship that was at once necessary, risky, and difficult to achieve.” According to Newton, it was the Barlow episode that crystalized Burney’s awareness that marriage was a market, and generated her idea of focusing her first published narrative on “the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World.”5
Burney sets up the market metaphor graphically at the beginning of Evelina. On Monday morning, Evelina goes with the female Mirvans “a shopping” (a new word at the time) to the retail stores of the mercers selling silks and the milliners creating the elaborate headdresses then worn in society, and she is made uncomfortable by the “bowing and smirking” of the shopkeepers displaying their wares to their customers (volume I, letter X). On the same evening, she attends a private ball and finds that it is now she who has become the goods on display:
The private ball is where Evelina is goods on display, and it is not clear how very different the situation of every young lady is from that of the prostitutes that Evelina encounters in Marylebone Gardens, who are also goods on display in a somewhat different rental market.
And, in fact, being goods on display is only part of the problem. Young ladies are also in danger of being roughly handled by prospective buyers, the gentlemen who may court and ultimately marry them. Evelina presents an entire menagerie of deplorable gentlemen, whose chivalry hides imperfectly a brutality under the surface. Mr. Lovel exhibits a combination of impertinence and cringing, while Lord Merton simply cuts anyone he thinks is beneath him. And then there is the predatory Sir Clement Willoughby, who repeatedly comes to Evelina’s rescue only as a way of getting her into his clutches. After the opera, he offers to take her home and instead drives in a different direction. In the next volume, he does something similar in the “dark walks” of Vauxhall Gardens, where the Branghton girls have taken Evelina. Breaking away from a large party of drunken men,
But of course saving Evelina is for Sir Clement only an excuse for immediately taking her hand, pressing it passionately and making violent love to her. In “Getting Waylaid in Evelina,” Susan Fraiman discusses Willoughby’s behavior as a recurrent pattern in the novel: in “a satiric and sadistic rewriting of the fairy tale … the very man who saves the heroine from distress takes advantage of her trust and gratitude to assault her in turn. As prince turns into dragon, rescue into recapture, and relief into trepidation, Evelina begins to doubt not only the world but also her own ability to interpret it.”6 As Fraiman points out, this pattern also is seen in the tragedy of Evelina’s mother, who turned to Sir John Belmont in order to avoid being married against her will to a man of Madame Duval’s choice, only to be betrayed and abandoned by Sir John.
But although Frances Burney knew how ladies got waylaid, she concluded Evelina with a fairy‐tale ending in which her heroine is acknowledged by her father, made his heir, and married to her Prince Charming. We can see in her earliest novel an ironic sense of how women are made into commodities within a commodity culture, but the voice of this novel is not one of feminist protest demanding social change, like that of her slightly younger contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft. Thirty‐five years later Burney’s last novel, The Wanderer, would indeed attempt to vindicate the rights of women but England was still unwilling to listen to this message.
Evelina was not only the titular heroine’s entrance into the world but its author’s as well. Samuel Johnson and his hostess Hester Thrale immediately wanted to know her, as did the playwright and manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. It was undoubtedly for Sheridan that she began work in 1779 on a satirical drama, The Witlings, a comedy of repartee in which many of the characters often seem to be responding to their own thoughts and not to each other, creating something of a theatre‐of‐the‐absurd atmosphere. Evelina, for all its success – it rapidly went through four editions – was a first novel by an unknown author and had gained her only twenty guineas (£21), but the production of a comedy might have made its author some real money. But when Daddy Crisp and her father Charles Burney understood that the play attacked the egotism of learned ladies, including a few of those who had been helpful to the Burneys, he firmly forbade her to allow it to be produced or circulated in any other way. Her father told her that “not only the plot, but the whole piece, had best be kept secret from everyone.” Burney completed The Witlings but it remained among her papers (at the Berg Collection in New York) until it was given its world premiere two centuries later, in 1998, in Houston.
Burney next wrote Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), for which she received the decent sum of £250. Like Evelina, it is a courtship novel designed to end in the happy marriage of the eponymous heroine, but the often boisterous comedy of the first novel gives way to a far darker tone. Society in Evelina is bright with urban pleasures, and even though there are dangerous traps and embarrassing faux pas to negotiate, selfish motives are all too obvious. In Cecilia, it is not merely that the characters have dark and more deeply hidden motives, but society itself seems less stable, based on credit which, like our beliefs in the benevolence of others, may suddenly vanish. The apparently wealthy man of business may be under water with debt and willing to drag a naive heiress under with him; apparent friends may be luring one to destruction. Unlike the Cinderella‐like heroine Evelina, Cecilia has both a name and means; she is an orphaned heiress who is soon to come into two separate fortunes. But her three guardians are all deeply flawed, and it is precisely because of her virtue and good intentions that they bring her to near‐ruin and madness before the comic peripety.
Burney adopted a third‐person narrator for Cecilia, using sentence rhythms lifted from Samuel Johnson, but the novel is primarily focalized through the heroine, and in a few places we begin to see one of the earliest uses of free indirect discourse in the novel. In the following passage Burney first summarizes the contents of Cecilia’s mind – what Dorrit Cohn calls psychonarration – then makes a deeper dive into free indirect discourse, and, at the end of this passage, Burney moves into direct quotation in the first person of Cecilia’s thoughts. (In Chapter 11, we see how this technique has advanced further in Jane Austen’s Emma.)
Cecilia was as great a success as Evelina, but dark clouds were gathering. Daddy Crisp died in 1783; in the following year Hester Thrale married the musician Gabriel Piozzi and broke with both Burney and Samuel Johnson, who died in 1784. And the same year it became clear that her romantic interest in George Cambridge, a clergyman and art collector whom she found “elegant and sensible,” would come to nothing. A visit to the royal court in 1785 led to Burney being offered the post of Mistress of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, which she accepted in 1786 and continued in for five years. Her biographer Margaret Doody views these years as a kind of imprisonment in the gilded bubble of Windsor Castle, working as a servant summoned by a bell. She was well compensated (at £200 per year) but miserable. Burney wrote tragic drama but no satirical novels during this period, including the only play (Edwy and Elgiva) to be enacted during her lifetime (a single performance in 1795). Queen Charlotte released her prisoner in 1791, with a life pension of £100.
Staying with her favorite sister Susanna in Mickleham, Burney became acquainted at nearby Juniper Hall with French emigrés who had fled the Revolution – then entering its radical phase – including Germaine de Staël, Charles de Talleyrand, and Alexandre d’Arblay. D’Arblay was a general who had commanded the artillery under the Marquis de Lafayette, and shared Lafayette’s politics, which favored a constitutional monarchy. Burney and d’Arblay began a correspondence, helped learn each other’s languages, and sentimental friendship led to an engagement. Burney was 40, D’Arblay one year younger, and though her father disapproved of the romance, Burney had her pension, which allowed them to marry in 1793; her son Alexandre was born the following year. Burney returned to writing fiction, publishing Camilla, or A Picture of Youth in 1796; another success, the royalties of £1000 on the first edition and £1000 for the sale of the copyright allowed the d’Arblays to build what they called Camilla Cottage in Surrey, southwest of London.
In 1801, d’Arblay was offered a post in Napoleon’s government, and Frances and their son relocated to Paris where, owing to the war between France and England, they were forced to remain for over ten years. In 1812, Burney and her son succeeded in returning to England, where in 1814 she completed and published her last novel (The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties), set twenty years earlier in 1794. The heroine of The Wanderer is an English lady who has fled home from the Terror in France, but who is treated with suspicion in her native land and exploited by the wealthy. Perhaps because of its political critique, The Wanderer was a failure compared with her earlier novels; it sold out its first edition, but subsequent printings had to be pulped.
At the abdication of Napoleon, Burney returned to France to be with her husband, and was in Brussels when Napoleon, returning from exile on Elba, met his final defeat at Waterloo. D’Arblay, who had recruited French soldiers to fight against Napoleon, was rewarded by the restored Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, with the title of count and the rank of lieutenant general. He retired with Frances to Bath, where he died in 1818. Burney also survived her son Alexandre, who died of influenza in 1837. Burney lived to see Victoria come to the throne, and died in London in 1840. Burney’s letters and journals were published after her death – they include a scarifying first‐person account of her radical mastectomy for suspected cancer, performed without an anaesthetic in Paris in 1811 – and they present a lively, courageous, even heroic personality, willing to court disapproval by parental figures who loved but attempted to smother her. Her place in the novel is a bridge between Richardson and Fielding at midcentury and Austen and Scott who followed: she developed techniques of free indirect discourse that allowed her third‐person narrator to create both empathy and irony in relation to her heroines. Evelina and Cecilia survived and continued to be read throughout the nineteenth century in collected editions of English fiction, like that of Anna Lætitia Barbauld. Camilla and The Wanderer were not reprinted until the feminist wave of the 1980s brought Burney’s reputation to its present position as one of the most important novelists of the late eighteenth century.