Fanny Burney

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the 18th-century novelist, playwright and diarist Fanny Burney, also known as Madame D’Arblay and Frances Burney. Her first novel, Evelina, was published anonymously and caused a sensation, attracting the admiration of many eminent contemporaries. In an era when very few women published their work she achieved extraordinary success, and her admirers included Dr Johnson and Edmund Burke; later Virginia Woolf called her ‘the mother of English fiction’.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Nicole Pohl 2 episodes
  Reader in English Literature at Oxford Brookes University
• Judith Hawley 13 episodes
  Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
• John Mullan 14 episodes
  Professor of English at University College London

Reading list

• Journals and Letters
  Frances Burney (eds. Peter Sabor and Lars Troide) (Penguin, 2001) Google Books →
• Evelina
  Frances Burney (eds. E. and L. Bloom) (Oxford World's Classics, 2002) Google Books →
• Camilla
  Frances Burney (eds. E. and L. Bloom) (Oxford World's Classics, 2009) Google Books →
• The Wanderer
  Frances Burney (ed. Margaret Doody) (Oxford World's Classics, 1999) Google Books →
• The Witlings & The Woman Hater
  Frances Burney (eds. Peter Sabor and Geoffrey Sill) (Broadview Editions, 2002) Google Books →
• Fanny Burney: Her Life
  Kate Chisholm (Chatto & Windus, 1998) Google Books →
• Dr Johnson's Women
  Norma Clarke (Bloomsbury, 2001) Google Books →
• Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Burney at the Court of King George III
  Hester Davenport (Sutton Publishing, 2000) Google Books →
• Frances Burney: The Life in the Works
  Margaret Anne Doody (Cambridge University Press, 1989) Google Books →
• Fanny Burney: A Biography
  Claire Harman (HarperCollins, 2000) Google Books →
• The History of Fanny Burney
  Joyce Hemlow (Oxford University Press, 1958) Google Books →
• Frail Vessels: Woman's Role in Women's Novels from Fanny Burney to George Eliot
  Hazel Mews (Bloomsbury Press, 2014) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney
  Peter Sabor (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b05r3zjk

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05r3zjk

Auto-category: 820.9 (English literature)