Wanderer, The, or Female Difficulties
Wanderer, The, or Female Difficulties,the last novel of F. Burney , published in 1814 . Less successful than her earlier works, it was criticized for improbabilities of plot ( Hazlitt in the Edinburgh Review , Feb. 1815 , commented that the female difficulties were ‘created out of nothing’) and for its convoluted style—according to Macaulay ‘a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous patois’. It describes the adventures of its mysterious and, for much of the novel, nameless heroine, Juliet, escaped from revolutionary France and hard pressed by poverty, unwanted male attention, and the social conventions which prevent her from earning her own living. Her friend and foil, the passionate Elinor Joddrel, who is in love with Juliet's admirer Harleigh, provides an interesting portrait of the emancipated woman of the period, possibly based in part on Mme de Staël , whom Burney had met in 1793 at Juniper...
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