Editing Frances Burney (section)

==''The Wanderer'' and ''Memoirs of Dr Burney''==
Burney published her fourth novel, ''[[The Wanderer: Or, Female Difficulties]]'', a few days before her father's death. "A story of love and misalliance set in the French Revolution", it criticises the English treatment of foreigners in the war years.<ref name="Commire, Klezmer 231"/> It also criticizes the hypocritical social restriction put on women in general – as the heroine tries one means after another to earn an honest living – and the elaborate class criteria for social inclusion or exclusion. That strong social message sits uneasily within an unusual structure that might be called a [[melodrama]]tic proto-[[mystery fiction|mystery]] novel with elements of the [[picaresque]]. The heroine is no scallywag, but she is wilful and for obscure reasons refuses to reveal her name or origin. So as she darts about the South of England as a fugitive, she arouses suspicions.

Some parallels of plot and attitude have been drawn between ''The Wanderer'' and the early novels of [[Helen Craik]], which she could have read in the 1790s.<ref>{{Cite book |author1=Adriana Craciun |author2=Kari Lokke |author3=Kari E. Lokke |title=Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=auxPmpSkTjsC |date=2001 |publisher=SUNY Press |isbn=978-0-7914-4969-1 |page=219}}</ref>

Burney made £1500 from the first run, but the work disappointed her followers and did not go into a second English printing, although it met her immediate financial needs. Critics felt it lacked the insight of her earlier novels.<ref name="Commire, Klezmer 231"/> It was reprinted in 1988 with an introduction by the novelist [[Margaret Drabble]] in the "Mothers of the Novel" series.<ref>Fanny Burney: ''The Wanderer or, Female Difficulties'' (London: Pandora Press, 1988). {{ISBN|0-86358-263-X}}</ref>

After her husband's death at 23 Great Stanhope Street, Bath, Burney moved to London to be nearer to her son, then a fellow at [[Christ's College, Cambridge|Christ's College]].<ref name="Encyclopædia Britannica 451"/> In homage to her father she gathered and in 1832 published in three volumes the ''Memoirs of Doctor Burney''. These were written in a [[panegyric]] style, praising her father's accomplishments and character, and she drew on many of her own personal writings from years before to produce them. Protective of her father and the family reputation, she destroyed evidence of facts that were painful or unflattering and was soundly criticised by contemporaries and later by historians for doing so.<ref name="Commire, Klezmer 231"/>