Frances Burney and the Female Bildungsroman

Frances Burney's last novel The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties (1814) is a fascinating study of late-eighteenth-century English society. But is it a good novel, too? For years and years, critics have denied the book's literary merit. Read as a Bildungsroman, however, the novel's many puzzling complexities, seeming irregularities, and frequent didactic « asides suddenly fall into place. Far from being Burney's least important work, The Wanderer is an intricate portrait of what it meant to be a humanist, a refugee, and a woman at the time of the French Revolution.