She wrote a memoir of her father (1832), and is perhaps best remembered as the author of letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1842, whose influence has overshadowed the reputation of her fiction, establishing her posthumously as a diarist more than as a novelist or playwright.

All Burney's novels explore the lives of English aristocrats and satirises their social pretensions and personal foibles, with an eye to larger questions such as the politics of female identity.

With one exception, Burney never succeeded in having her plays performed, largely due to objections from her father, who thought that publicity from such an effort would be damaging to her reputation.

[5] Although her novels were hugely popular during her lifetime, Burney's reputation as a writer of fiction suffered after her death at the hands of biographers and critics, who felt that the extensive diaries, published posthumously in 1842–1846, offer a more interesting and accurate portrait of 18th-century life.

Today, critics are returning to her novels and plays with renewed interest in her outlook on the social lives and struggles of women in a predominantly male-oriented culture.

[6] Throughout her writing career, Burney's talent for satirical caricature was widely acknowledged: figures such as Dr Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Hester Lynch Thrale, David Garrick and other members of the Blue Stockings Society to which she aligned herself were among her admirers.

[10] Her younger sister Susanna married, in 1781, Molesworth Phillips, an officer in the Royal Marines who had sailed in Captain Cook's last expedition; she left a journal that gives a principal eye-witness account of the Gordon Riots.

[14] Frances Burney's mother, Esther Sleepe, described by historians as a woman of "warmth and intelligence", was the daughter of a French refugee named Dubois and had been brought up a Catholic.

Scholars who have looked into the extent of Burney's reading and self-education find a child who was unusually precocious and ambitious, working hard to overcome an early disability.

Burney left detailed accounts of people they entertained, notably of Omai, a young man from Raiatea, and of Alexis Orlov, a favourite of Catherine the Great.

[16] A critical aspect of Burney's literary education was her relationship with a family friend, the dramatist Samuel Crisp, who had met her father in about 1745 at the house of Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville.

Editors Lars Troide and Joyce Hemlow recovered some of this obscured material while researching their editions of Burney's journals and letters in the late twentieth century.

[22] Burney, who worked as her father's amanuensis, had copied the manuscript in a "disguised hand" to prevent any identification of the book with her family, thinking that her own handwriting might be recognised by a publisher.

[26] Comic and witty, it is ultimately a satire of the oppressive masculine values that shaped a young woman's life in the 18th century, and of other forms of social hypocrisy.

What critics have consistently found interesting in her writing is the introduction and careful treatment of a female protagonist, complete with character flaws, "who must make her way in a hostile world."

Thrale wrote to Dr Burney on 22 July: "Mr. Johnson returned home full of the Prayes of the Book I had lent him, and protesting that there were passages in it which might do honour to Richardson: we talk of it for ever, and he feels ardent after the dénouement; he could not get rid of the Rogue, he said.

[22] In 1779, encouraged by the public's warm reception of comic material in Evelina, and with offers of help from Arthur Murphy and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Burney began to write a dramatic comedy called The Witlings.

It was not published at the time because Burney's father and the family friend Samuel Crisp thought it would offend some of the public by seeming to mock the Bluestockings, and because they had reservations about the propriety of a woman writing comedy.

Beset on all sides by suitors, the beautiful and intelligent Cecilia's heart is captivated by a man whose family's pride in its birth and ancestry would forbid such a change of name.

Her fellow Bluestocking, Anna Laetitia Barbauld wrote to Burney in 1813 encouraging her to publish her novel The Wanderer in the United States where her work, including Cecilia, was popular.

[35] Having accepted the post in 1786, she developed a warm relationship with the queen and princesses that lasted into her later years, yet her doubts proved accurate: the position exhausted her and left her little time for writing.

Her sorrow was intensified by poor relations with her colleague Juliane Elisabeth von Schwellenburg, co-Keeper of the Robes, who has been described as "a peevish old person of uncertain temper and impaired health, swaddled in the buckram of backstairs etiquette.

To her friends and to her sister Susanna, she recounted her life in court, along with major political events, including the public trial of Warren Hastings for "official misconduct in India".

These are the dramatic fragment conventionally known as Elberta and three completed plays copied out in handwriting in ordered booklets, suitable for private circulation, if not publication.

[37] Even for the handful of scholars who have dealt with them, these texts remain devoid of particular dramatic qualities, indeed 'wretched', as they are often called: in the form in which they have come to us they seem too long to be staged; characterizations are stereotyped; the endings are weak, and the plots convoluted and inconsistent.

[38] In 1790–1791 Burney wrote four blank-verse tragedies: Hubert de Vere, The Siege of Pevensey, Elberta and Edwy and Elgiva, only the last of which was performed.

One of a profusion of paintings and literary works about the early English king Eadwig (Edwy) and his wife Ælfgifu (Elgiva) to appear in the later 18th century, it met with public failure, opening in London in March for only one night.

[44] First performed in December 2007 at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, it retains one of the central characters, Lady Smatter – an absent-minded but inveterate quoter of poetry, perhaps meant as a comic rendering of a Bluestocking.

[45][46] In 1801 d'Arblay was offered service with the government of Napoleon Bonaparte in France, and in 1802 Burney and her son followed him to Paris, where they expected to remain for a year.

presently the terrible cutting was renewed – & worse than ever, to separate the bottom, the foundation of this dreadful gland from the parts to which it adhered – Again all description would be baffled – yet again all was not over, – Dr. Larry rested but his own hand, & – Oh heaven!