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 name by which she is remembered is her nickname, "Fanny," though the author at her death had long been a comtesse. This author has never been ignored, yet her whole achievement has still to gain its full recognition; she has too often been presented only as the author of Evelina (1778), and as an Evelina-like personality. Appreciation of her work as a novelist will grow as new editions make her work available; she may also win posthumous reputation as a dramatist as her previously unpublished comic plays emerge into print.
Frances Burney was the fourth of the six children of Charles Burney, who was soon to become England's first musicologist, and Esther Sleepe Burney.
