Queen Charlotte’s expression, that she was “true as gold,” was abundantly verified in her friendship.

Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, Edr.: ‘Diary and Letters of Frances Burney, Mme. D’Arblay.’

The novels give an impression of a singularly keen, clever, observant woman, with a sense of the ridiculous too much developed to be a very sympathetic, or even safe, friend....

She is seen to best advantage in the book where she appears as daughter, sister, friend, servant (there is really no other word for the position she held at court), and finally wife and mother. In the ‘Diary and Letters’ we not only learn how largely voluntary were the restrictions she imposed upon her literary work, but how much her private life gained in charm and usefulness by the subordination of the author’s part; and, learning this, we forgive her the more easily for having partially hidden the talent which, well husbanded, might have given us more ‘Evelinas’ and ‘Cecilias.’... Delightful as ‘Evelina’ and ‘Cecilia’ are to those whose taste they suit, it is doubtful whether we should get more enjoyment out of a dozen novels of the same quality than we do out of these two. And ... at the present moment these two are more than enough for most people.

Mary Elizabeth Christie: ‘Miss Burney’s Novels.’

I attended her during the last twenty years of her long life. She lived in almost total seclusion from all but a few members of her own family; changed her lodgings more frequently than her dresses and occupied herself laboriously in composing those later works which retain so little of the charm of her earlier writings. Mr. Rogers was the only literary man who seemed to know of her existence.

Sir Henry Holland: ‘Recollections of Past Life.’ New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1872.

Was introduced by Rogers to Mme. D’Arblay, the celebrated authoress of ‘Evelina’ and ‘Cecilia’—an elderly lady, with no remains of personal beauty, but with a simple and gentle manner, a pleasing expression of countenance, and apparently quick feelings.

Sir Walter Scott: Diary, November, 1826, in ‘Memoirs,’ by J. G. Lockhart.

I do not think very highly of Mme. D’Arblay’s books. The style is so strutting. She does so stalk about on Dr. Johnson’s old stilts. What she says wants so much translating into common English, and when translated would seem so commonplace, that I have always felt strongly tempted to read all the serious parts with my fingers’ ends.... A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of wax-work. Mme. D’Arblay has much talent, but no taste. Another fault is the sameness of her characters; they all say one thing twenty times over.... They have but one note.

Mary Russell Mitford: Letters to Sir W. Elford, in ‘Life,’ edited by Rev. A. G. L’Estrange. London: Richard Bentley, 1870.

Madame D’Arblay is quite of the old school, a mere common observer of manners, and also a very woman. It is this last circumstance which forms the peculiarity of her writings. She is a quick, lively, and accurate observer of persons and things; but she always looks at them with a consciousness of her sex, and in that point of view in which it is the particular business and interest of women to observe them. There is little in her works of passion or character, or even manners, in the most extended sense of the word, as implying the sum total of our habits and pursuits; her forte is in describing the absurdities and affectations of external behavior, or the manners of people in company. Her characters, which are ingenious caricatures, are, no doubt, distinctly marked, and well kept up; but they are slightly shaded, and exceedingly uniform. Her heroes and heroines, almost all of them, depend upon the stock of a single phrase or sentiment, and have certain mottoes or devices by which they may always be known. They form such characters as people might be supposed to assume for a night at a masquerade.... The Braughtons are the best. Mr. Smith is an exquisite city portrait. ‘Evelina’ is also her best novel, because it is the shortest; that is, it has all the liveliness in the sketches of character, and smartness of comic dialogue and repartee, without the tediousness of the story, and endless affectation of sentiment which disfigures the others.

William Hazlitt: Lecture on the English Novelists, in ‘Lecture on the English Poets, and the English Comic Writers,’ edited by Wm. Carew Hazlitt. London: Bell & Daldy, 1869.

She is sometimes accused of being superficial, because she dares so little in the direction of the stronger and deeper passions and interests of human nature. But this criticism is itself superficial: the truer word for her is reserved. She shut the door upon the whole range of bold speculation and unconventional feeling, because she considered these things unfit for the novelist, and especially for the female novelist, to treat of. But her own feelings were deep, and her own interests and sympathies were wide; and in drawing her characters, though she seldom attempts to paint much—save in conventional outline—that goes below the surface, she yet shows at all times, by the firmness and consistency of her creations, that she possessed the root of the matter in understanding, if not in creative power and courage of execution.

Mary Elizabeth Christie: ‘Miss Burney’s Novels.’

We are forced to refuse Madame D’Arblay a place in the highest rank of art; but we cannot deny that, in the rank to which she belonged, she had few equals, and scarcely any superior. The variety of humors which is to be found in her novels is immense; and though the talk of each person separately is monotonous, the general effect is not monotony, but a very lively and agreeable diversity. Her plots are rudely constructed and improbable, if we consider them in themselves. But they are admirably framed for the purpose of exhibiting striking groups of eccentric characters, each governed by his own peculiar whim, each talking his own peculiar jargon, and each bringing out by opposition the peculiar oddities of all the rest.

Madame D’Arblay was most successful in comedy, and indeed in comedy which bordered on farce. But we are inclined to infer from some passages, both in ‘Cecilia’ and ‘Camilla,’ that she might have attained equal distinction in the pathetic. We have formed this judgment less from those ambitious scenes of distress which lie near the catastrophe of each of these novels than from some exquisite strokes of natural tenderness which take us here and there by surprise.

It is not only on account of the intrinsic merit of Madame D’Arblay’s early works that she is entitled to honorable mention. Her appearance is an important epoch in our literary history. ‘Evelina’ was the first tale written by a woman, and purporting to be a picture of life and manners, that lived or deserved to live. Indeed, most of the popular novels which preceded ‘Evelina’ were such as no lady would have written; and many of them were such as no lady could without confusion own that she had read. Miss Burney did for the English novel what Jeremy Collier did for the English drama; and she did it in a better way. She first showed that a tale might be written in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life of London might be exhibited with great force, and with broad comic humor, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with rigid morality. She took away the reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. She vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters. The fact that she has been surpassed gives her an additional claim to our respect and gratitude; for, in truth, we owe to her, not only ‘Evelina,’ ‘Cecilia,’ and ‘Camilla,’ but also ‘Mansfield Park’ and the ‘Absentee.’

Lord Macaulay: ‘Essay on Mme. D’Arblay.’

The very gift that first made Miss Burney’s reputation now stands in the way of her popularity. She was so completely mistress of the art of letting her personages reveal their own characters, that she could afford to dispense to an unusual extent with the showman’s part. She constructed her personages not from within (as is the modern fashion) but by means of a thousand minute touches showing their conversation and behavior in an infinite variety of such small circumstances as make up the daily round of existence. She positively reveled in descriptive minutiæ of this sort. Nothing was too trivial for her, nothing too intricate in the web of petty embarrassments and mortifications and misunderstandings, that make the sum of a vast majority of human lives, and a tremendous factor of the remainder. Thanks to unusually buoyant spirits and a never-flagging sense of the ridiculous, she was constantly amused where others are only bored; and according to the infallible rule that, given the necessary powers of expression, authors never bore till they are bored themselves, she was able to make amusing to others the commonplace things that afforded entertainment to herself. Moreover, her success in her own day was quite as much due to the fact that her material was commonplace as to the keen perception of character, and the racy humor she displayed in working it up. Only the chosen few might appreciate her literary skill, but it needed no special gifts of culture to enter into the agitations of Evelina’s first ball. However, it is necessary to understand a situation or a character before we can be amused by it. And as nothing in life changes so fast as its surface, the author who gives most pains to the finish of this, is also the first to become obsolete. Fashions in manner and dress and speech are proverbially ephemeral, and except for those in whom the antiquarian taste has been somehow developed, they lose charm and even meaning in passing out of date. Heroes and heroines, whose coats and gowns, and courtesies and bows, are all behind the time, of whom the colloquial talk is a forgotten jargon, and the ceremony as strange as the ritual of a foreign religion, stand no chance in competition with the crowd of ladies and gentlemen who are daily turned out by contemporary novelists, wearing costumes and talking a language of which every fold and every phrase makes a claim upon the reader’s sympathy, and an item in the general index to the author’s meaning. Miss Burney’s personages, once so fashionable and so familiar, have grown strange now that a century has passed over their heads; and though underneath the disguise of their Old World costumes they are still fresh and human, this is a secret only to be discovered at the cost of more careful reading than the modern world is apt to give to novels.

Mary Elizabeth Christie: ‘Miss Burney’s Novels.’