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Radical Translations
  • Date
  • False: false attribution such as false place of imprint or false date
  • Fictional place: false imprint contains a fictional, invented place of imprint or date
  • Form: type or genre of writing.
  • Female
  • Male
  • Language
  • Noble: person was born noble.
  • Place
  • Role: the main role of a person or organization in relation to a resource.
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The wanderer, or Female difficulties

1814 Forms: Fiction, Gothic fiction Translation Status: Source-text English London URL

Contributions

Fanny Burney
author
Thomas Norton Longman
publisher

Related resources

has translation
La femme errante, ou les embarras d'une femme translation

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Notes

Part of a new genre produced in response to the French Revolution, which also included works such as Charlotte Smith's 'Desmond' (1792). Burney's novel, a blend of historical novel with Gothic overtones, took 14 years to complete . She started it in the late 1790s and continued to work on it during her exile in France with her husband, General d'Arblay, because of the Napoleonic Wars.

In it she promoted the rights of women and criticized English society, especially for the hold of the rich over the poor and its attitude towards foreigners. Her sympathy for working women may have been influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's 'Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman'' (1798). Her heroine, an Everywoman who is never placed socially so has no support, flees the Terror to England where she is exploited by other women and pined over by men.

While the first edition sold out due to Burney's reputation, it subsequently sold very poorly due to the scathing reviews for its portrayal of women and English society, including one by the radical William Hazlitt in the Edinburgh Review, who complained that its focus on "women's problems" did not make for interesting fiction.