Burney, Frances

When Virginia Woolf in 1918 (in aTLSreview of 17 October) declared Frances Burney (1752–1840) to be ‘the mother of English fiction’, and when inA Room with a View(1929) she opined that ‘Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney’, she spoke both polemically and with prescience. Woolf's comments formed part of her continuing manifesto on the significance of women writers in English literary history, on the undeniable evidence of ‘the extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women’, and on the political and cultural sea change that transpired at the turn between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when middle‐class women took up writing as a profession and channelled their creativity and ‘common sitting‐room’ observations (often their only literary training) into the penning of novels, plays, diaries, and memoirs. Woolf placed Burney at the very centre of her polemic on women writers from Aphra Behn to George Eliot and their vital contributions to the evolving forms of the novel. Woolf's argument could not project forwards across two centuries to predict Burney's specific and documented canonical place in the literary and critical history of our time; nor yet could Woolf's prescience encompass full recognition of Burney's enduring contemporaneity – a timelessness which pre‐empts her Enlightenment and Romantic milieus as she addresses issues of form, gender, race, authority, and power that continue to focus our cultural inquiry in the twenty‐first century.