The vivid life and lustrous works by Frances Burney

   At around the time of her fifteenth birthday in 1767, Frances Burney made a bonfire of her juvenalia in the garden of her London home, intending to extinguish forever in their ashes her scribbling propensity. She was worried that even if she might turn into a popular author, that profession would be incompatible with respectability, for a woman. Eventually, she became less
enthusiastic about writing; however, over the next fifty years Burney wrote four novels which made her the best-known author of her generation, seven plays and voluminous diary which, with her correspondence, is one of the most revealing personal documents of the period. She was the friend of Sheridan, Garrick, Burke and Dr Johnson. Against her will, she was appointed Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, and lived at Court for five years during the time of George III's 'madness`. After an unexpected late marriage to a French refugee aristocrat she was detained for ten years in post-Revolutionary France. Burney's diaries fascinate modern readers as much as her novels do. They show that the Mother of English Fiction', as Virginia Woolf called her, was an anxious and vulnerable pioneer.

   The relevance of this article is bound up with the fact that we can consider Burney`s novels as representative examples of the social-psychological novels of the end of the 18^th – beginning of the 19^th centuries in the English literature, when the new principles of writing were produced.

   The results of analysis of these works may allow us to make deductions and generalizations, concerning the prose of the transitional period from the Enlightenment to Romanticism taking into account the tradition of the past and perspectives of evolution in the future – romantic time. The study of Burney`s novels, clearing up their specificity and national peculiarity, are given in context of the socio-cultural situation of the epoch, evolution of the spiritual life, politics and history.

   All these factors compile aims and tasks of this research.

   Burney investigated complicity of human feelings, richness of its manifestations and interrelation of person and environment In perspective critics can develop the study of similar problems in the works of the English authors of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

1. Sambrook J. The Eighteenth Century. The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature. 1700-1789.Lоndon; New York: Longman; 1986:290 (in English).

2. Drew E. The Literature of Gossip. Nine English Letter- writers. New York: Norton; 1964:254 (in English).

3. Sage V. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. Basingstoke; London: Macmillan; 1988:262 (in English).

4. Probyn C.T. English Fiction of the XVIII Century, 1700-1789. London: New York: Longman; 1987:244 (in English).

5. Bronwell M.R. Alexander Pope and Arts of Georgian England. Oxford: Clarendon Press; 1978:401 (in English).

6. Irving W.H. The Providence of Wit in the English Letter Writers. Durham: North Carolina; 1955:359 (in English).

7. Walpole H. Horace Walpole's Miscellany. 1786-1795. Ed. by Lars E. Troide. New Haven; London: Yale University Press; 1978:174 (in English).

8. Johnson S. Selected Letters of Samuel Johnson. Oxford: Humphrey Milford; Oxford University Press; 1925:268 (in English).

9. Burney F. Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney. Extracts from Fanny Burney's Prose 1777-1784. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press; 1989:161 (in English).

10. Humphreys A.R. The Literary Scene. The Pelican Guite to English Literature. Vol. 4. From Dryden to Johnson. Ed. by Boris Ford. London: Macmillan; 1979:51-93 (in English).

11. Burney F. Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. Edited by Edward A. Bloom and Vivien Jones. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2002, Reissued 2008:455 (in English). (Oxford World's Classics)

12. Burney F. Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress/Frances Burney. Edited by Peter Sabor and Margareth Anne Doody. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, (Oxford World's Classics); 2008:1004 (in English).

13. Burney F. Camilla, or A Picture of Youth. Edited by Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, Inc. New York. First published by Oxford University Press 1972; First issued by as a World's Classics paperback 1983; Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1999; Reissued; 2009:956 (in English).

14. Burney F. The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties. Edited by Margareth Anne Dooby, Robert L. Mack and Peter Sabor. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1991:470 (in English). (Oxford World's Classics)