The English novelist and diarist Fanny Burney (1752-1840) was one of the most popular novelists of the late 18th century. She was also an important chronicler of English manners, morals, and society. Fanny Burney, originally named Frances, was the daught...

Frances Burney is an important British comic novelist: she is one of the first of the women writers whose names have been repeatedly alluded to in literary histories, inscribed in biographical dictionaries, and remembered by a reading public. Yet the nam...

In the following excerpt, Straub examines Burney's portrayal of female maturity in Evelina and finds that her treatment of independent, mature women depicts two opposing female fates: the idealization of romantic love as the only acceptable feminine goal versus negative eighteenth-century ideological assumptions about female maturity.

In the following essay, Fizer investigates Burney's scrutiny of paternity in Evelina, maintaining that the novel presents a crisis of the father figure because of the numerous paternal models it portrays.

In the following essay, Campbell states that Evelina includes a “model of reading” similar to conduct literature in its concern with propriety, which is intended to instruct Burney's critics on how to read her work. Campbell further evaluates the way in which the male characters in the novel “read” Evelina, and render female characters into “texts” by objectifying them.