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Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the 18th-century novelist, playwright and diarist Fanny Burney, also known as Madame D'Arblay and Frances Burney. Her first novel, Evelina, was published anonymously and caused a sensation, attracting the admiration of many eminent contemporaries. In an era when very few women published their work she achieved extraordinary success, and her admirers included Dr Johnson and Edmund Burke; later Virginia Woolf called her 'the mother of English fiction'.

With

Nicole Pohl\nReader in English Literature at Oxford Brookes University

Judith Hawley\nProfessor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

and

John Mullan\nProfessor of English at University College London.

Producer: Simon Tillotson.