Fanny Burney

23 Apr, 2015 820 English and Old English literatures

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 →

Related episodes

Programme ID: b05r3zjk

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

Auto-category: 820.9 (English literature)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello, Virginia Woolf called Fanny Burney the mother of English fiction.