A country-bred girl of eighteen comes to London and writes home about every humiliation, in letters that made the whole town read her. Burney published it anonymously at twenty-five, having copied the manuscript in a disguised hand so the printers would not know her writing; Burke sat up all night with it, and Johnson was loud in its praise. Fifty-nine plates of painting from Gainsborough to Rowlandson, 1730 to 1850, picture the rustic girls, country lanes and crowded rooms of the world Burney's heroine leaves behind and enters.
