Frances Burney and the Female «Bildungsroman»

Frances Burney’s last novelThe Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties(1814) is a fascinating study of late-eighteenth-century English society. But is it a good novel, too? For years and years, critics have denied the book’s literary merit. Read as aBildungsroman, however, the novel’s many puzzling complexities, seeming irregularities, and frequent didactic «asides» suddenly fall into place. Far from being Burney’s least important work,The Wandereris an intricate portrait of what it meant to be a humanist, a refugee, and a woman at the time of the French Revolution.