In 1991, the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction devoted a special issue to Evelina, Frances Burney's first novel, with an introduction by Julia Epstein, four substantial essays, and an afterword by Margaret Anne Doody. It was a pivotal moment for Burney studies. Both Epstein and Doody had recently published major books on the author, and the special issue, the first that Eighteenth-Century Fiction had dedicated to any single novel, suggested that Evelina was a truly significant advance in the development of prose fiction, not merely a resting place on the long march from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen. Doody's afterword, however, entitled 'Beyond Evelina', struck a cautionary note. While acknowledging that the collection was a timely recognition of Burney's rapidly rising critical standing, Doody questioned why Evelina alone of her four novels was being awarded such attention, both here and in other literary journals. We need, she concluded, to consider Burney's work as a whole, not to make of her 'the one-book little novelist' (371). Austen herself, after all, in her fine tribute to Burney in Northanger Abbey (I, ch. 5), singled out for particular mention not Evelina but Burney's second and third novels, Cecilia and Camilla.

In the years since the publication of the special issue, Burney studies - like studies of the eighteenth-century novel in general - have undergone radical change. No longer is one of her four novels privileged at the expense of its three more ambitious and demanding successors, and no longer is Burney regarded only as a novelist.