On this day in 1840 Fanny Burney died. If the literary histories do not go as far as Virginia Woolf's pronouncement that Burney is "the mother of English fiction," they are nonetheless full of praise for her four novels, especially the first two, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782). As "the originator of the simple novel of home life," she is forerunner to and an influence on Jane Austen; her talent for storytelling is "not easily to be matched among English novelists"; her abundance and ability in caricature is "surpassed by Dickens only"; she has "the eye of the lynx" for the poser and the boor, and beside her lively creations "the figures of Smollett seem little better than stuffed birds in a museum ... FULL STORY »
