SOURCE: "Fanny Burney's Heroines," in Fanny Burney, Macmillan Education Ltd, 1987, pp. 24-42.

In the following essay, Simons compares the heroines in Burney's novels and discusses her treatment of women's issues.

The two modes of writing that Burney principally employed seem to reflect the separate worlds that she inhabited, the public and the private. Whereas her journals are unrestrained and direct—they confront emotion without melodrama and their style is fresh and effortless—her novels, reliant on conventions, are deeply indebted to contemporary literary models. Such disparity of method endorses the idea of the tensions of personality that Fanny Burney experienced, her struggle to blend self and society, and it is a struggle that all her writing in some way affirms.

The novels share a common theme, a theme which was to become increasingly familiar to readers of nineteenth-century fiction. It is identified in the subtitle to Evelina—A...