On June 13, 2002, I had the privilege of attending a rare event: the addition of a new memorial window to the Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey in London. This national shrine to England’s most revered authors is the burial site of such luminaries as Chaucer, Spenser, Tennyson, and Dickens. Those memorialized include Milton, William Blake, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde. As a tribute long overdue, Frances (“Fanny”) Burney (1752–1840), novelist, playwright, and diarist, received a place in Poets Corner on the 250th anniversary of her birth.

In Burney’s highly acclaimed first novel Evelina, the young protagonist receives a somber piece of advice from her guardian: “Remember, my dear…nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman: it is, at once, the most beautiful and most brittle of all human things.” Although the reference here is to female virtue—easily damaged, hard to repair—this statement may be even more true of the literary reputation of a woman writer, as Burney’s own story makes clear.

Burney enjoyed enormous success as a novelist in her lifetime. Friend to Samuel Johnson and many of the leading figures of her day, she was the most celebrated fiction writer of the last decades of the 1700s. As nineteenth-century historian Thomas Babington Macaulay put it, “She lived to be a classic.” After her death, when selections from the journals she kept for more than 70 years were first published, she became known as a vivid diarist, eyewitness to the bouts of madness of King George III and to the culmination of the Napoleonic wars.

Unfortunately, Burney’s literary reputation did not survive into the 20th century. When, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf named her the “mother of English fiction,” she did so in order to call attention to Burney’s unacknowledged role in England’s literary heritage.

How, some might ask, can a reputation of any merit be lost and then reclaimed, and what is the value of such recovery work? If Burney and other women writers were any good, why aren’t their works more widely known today?

Without going into too much detail about the politics of canon-formation (the way women have been repeatedly written out of history, regardless of the significance of their contributions and of the levels of recognition they achieved in their lifetime), I can sum up the fate of early women writers as a kind of Catch-22. Those who diverged from ideals of femininity did not fare well and those who conformed too closely to those ideals suffered an even worse fate since they were typically dismissed for lacking seriousness and appealing to a limited audience (such disparagement continues in the phrase “chick literature”).

Burney’s initial fame was based upon her first novel, a work that centered on a naive female character entering society and trying to make sense of what she sees. Readers tended to identify the youthful heroine with the author, and many assumed that Burney, like her protagonist, was an ingénue (she was actually 26 when the novel was published). Over the course of her career, Burney’s works became increasingly more difficult to view as wide-eyed and properly feminine. Her final novel, The Wanderer, bears the uncompromising subtitle, Female Difficulties, and contains lengthy speeches on the plight of women within a society that denies them the status of rational, independent beings. Critics at the time condemned the book as being out of keeping with the author’s earlier, more sprightly imagination, and for more than a century and a half, few had anything good to say about this bold and pioneering work.

At the end of the 20th century, thanks in large part to the efforts of feminist scholars, Burney began to find an audience once more. Those now interested in reading Burney’s fiction have access to modern editions of all four of her novels. Several new biographies have appeared, and her extensive life writing may be sampled in a recent Penguin paperback (Journals and Letters). Even her plays—unpublished in her lifetime—are now available, two of which have been successfully staged.

Associate professor of literature, Audrey Bilger visited London in June for a two-day conference honoring 18th century novelist Frances Burney, one of the subjects in her 1998 book, Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen (Wayne State University Press).