Evelina was a new woman in literature, a revelation to the men of the time of George the Third. The sincerity of the book could not be doubted. "But," they asked, "did Evelina represent the woman's point of view of life? Surely no man ever held like views." The Lovelaces and Tom Joneses are not so attractive as when seen through the eyes of their own sex, and the heroines are not so soft and yielding as a man would create them. Evelina, like all Miss Burney's heroines, is independent, fearless, and witty, with scarcely a trace of the traditional heroine of fiction. Saints and Magdalenes have always appealed to the masculine imagination. _La donna dolorosa_ has occupied a prominent place in the art and literature of man's creation. Here he has revealed his sex egoism in all its nudity: the woman weeping for man, either lover, husband, or son; man the centre of her thoughts, her hopes and fears. This new heroine with a new regard towards man was a revelation to them. Evelina was the first woman to break the spell, to show them woman as woman, in lieu of woman as parasite and adjunct to man. Evelina is not always pleasing; she hasn't always good manners; she sometimes laughs in the faces of the dashing beaux who are addressing her. But she is a woman of real flesh and blood; such women have existed in all time, and, liked many women we meet every day and whom men in all ages have known, Evelina insists on being the centre of every scene. In July, 1782, Miss Burney's second book, _Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress_, was published. This novel met with as enthusiastic a reception as _Evelina_. Gibbon read the whole five volumes in a day; Burke declared they had cost him three days, though he did not part with the story from the time he first opened it, and had sat up a whole night to finish it; and Sir Joshua Reynolds had been fed while reading it, because he refused to quit it at the table. The book shows more care and effort than _Evelina_. That was an outburst of youthful vivacity and spirits, but in _Cecilia_ the author is striving to do her best. This is particularly revealed in the style, which shows the influence of Doctor Johnson, for it has lost the simplicity of _Evelina_. The diction is more ambitious, and the sentences are longer, many of them balanced. Even some of the inferior characters from their speech, appear to have received a lesson in English composition from Dr. Johnson. But the novel owes its place among English classics to the varieties of characters portrayed and the vivid pictures of English life. Here again the gaieties of Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Marylebone and the Pantheon have become immortal, drawn with colours as vivid and enduring as Hogarth used in painting the sadder sides of London life. No other writer has brought these places before our eyes as clearly and as fully as Fanny Burney.