The Wanderer or The Social Vulnerability of Frances Burney’s Female Character
 A. Cristina Emanuela Dascalu

Frances Burney’s The Wanderer was heavily denounced by the author’s contemporaries as being anachronistic. However, most of the recent critical works analyzing the novel argue that The Wanderer is, in fact, an attack on the society emerging from the French Revolution and its “ideals.” Focusing on the female side of the revolution, Burney insists on the social vulnerability of women in an oppressive patriarchal system, while arguing as well that it is impossible to disentangle either women or art from public or economic life.

 The Wanderer is not as much a call for a social revolution that will allow women to participate in the public and economic spheres as it is a call for its readers to recognize that women already and inevitably do participate in the world. Also, Burney is the first novelist to seriously express sympathy for the working class women and to insist on the reification of the working class.

 The aim of this project is not only to add a new reading to the not-so-extensive body of Burney scholarship from a new angle, but also to redefine Burney’s place in the literary world. By claiming that the domestic world cannot be separated from the economic life, Burney implicitly criticizes some of the ideas shaping the romantic culture.  And with her spectacular analysis of the social vulnerability of women in a patriarchal capitalist society, Burney becomes a precursor of many modern and contemporary trends in literature and criticism, and, thus, The Wanderer deserves a secure place in the canon of English literature.