By Frances Burney

Evelina:

Fanny Burney’s wickedly funny satire follows the trials and romantic adventures of the young and beautiful Evelina as she tries to make her way through Eighteenth Century Britain handicapped by her three great problems, being poor, being illegitimate – and being a girl.

Evelina was a raging best-seller when it was first published in 1778 and is widely credited with being the first of the great British domestic novels. Burney was a direct influence on her immediate follower Jane Austen, who used some of the final lines from Burney’s novel Cecilia for one of her own fairly successful novels – ‘…if to pride and prejudice you owe your miseries…to pride and prejudice you will also owe their termination’.