Burney's final novel, 'The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties,' set partly during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, was published on 28 March 1814.
On 28 March 1814, Fanny Burney's fourth and final novel, The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties, was published by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, who paid her £1,500 for the rights—an even larger sum than she had received for Camilla, reflecting her continued standing as a major literary figure despite years away from publishing.
The novel, Burney's longest and most ambitious work, follows an unnamed heroine fleeing Revolutionary France and struggling to establish an independent identity and livelihood in England amid poverty, prejudice, and social constraint. Drawing directly on Burney's own decade of residence in Napoleonic France (1802–1812) as the wife of French general Alexandre D'Arblay, the novel offers a searing critique of the limited economic and social options available to women, particularly those without family protection or fortune.
The Wanderer was published amid a changed literary landscape; tastes had shifted since Burney's earlier triumphs, and the novel received a more mixed critical reception than her previous works, with some critics finding its social critique overly didactic. Nonetheless, modern scholars have increasingly recognized it as a sophisticated and prescient exploration of women's economic vulnerability and the intersection of gender, class, and political upheaval.
As Burney's last novel, published when she was 61 years old, The Wanderer represents the culmination of a literary career spanning over three decades, bridging the sentimental fiction of the eighteenth century and the more socially conscious novels that would follow in the nineteenth century.