Evelina or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World

Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay after her marriage) was an English writer. The novels by Burney were read and appreciated by Jane Austen (the title of her main novel Pride and Prejudice is a quote from Burney's Cecilia), W.M. Thackeray used her diaries as a source for the description of The Battle of Waterloo in the novel Vanity Fair. Virginia Woolf highly valued Burney's "diaries". Her significance was fully realized in the 20th century, when she was called "the mother of English prose". Novels by Burney, Evelina in particular, that anticipate romanticism were written in epistolary or autobiographic form; they are psychologically true and contain invaluable observations of society and world in the era of Napoleon's wars.