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grow as new editions make her work available; she may also win posthumous reputation as a dramatist as her previously unpublished comic plays emerge into print.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...