Book excerpt: This eBook edition of "The Diary and Collected Letters of Madame D'Arblay, Frances Burney" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Frances Burney was a famous English novelist, diarist and playwright. Burney's novels explore the lives of English aristocrats, and satirize their social pretensions and personal foibles, with an eye to larger questions such as the politics of female identity. She has gained critical respect in her own right, but she also foreshadowed such novelists of manners with a satirical bent as Jane Austen and Thackeray. Novels: Evelina Cecilia Camilla The Wanderer Plays: The Witlings Journals & Diaries: The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Other Works: Brief Reflections Relative to the French Emigrant Clergy Biography: Fanny Burney by Austin Dobson