Fanny Burney would not approve of some of my chapters, but it was my affection for the novels of her school, in which the heroine goes through all kinds of distresses but emerges in a sweeping triumph at the end, that made me long to try my hand at the same theme--treating it, however, in our down-to-earth twentieth-century way. This brilliant homage to the 19th century novel begins with two young women--Lucy, sturdy and unflappable, and...