The position Frances Burney (1752-1840) holds as a novelist, journalist, and letter-writer is now undisputed, thanks to reevaluations of the canon in recent years. Yet she was always intrigued by, and wrote for, the stage.

Though only one of Burney's dramas was performed in her lifetime, Barbara Darby places the plays in the context of performance and feminist theory, challenging past assertions about Burney that were based entirely on her novels and journals. Darby maintains that in exposing the failure of such practices and institutions as courtship, marriage, family, government, and the church, Burney's dramas often exceed her novels in the depth of their social commentary.

Frances Burney, Dramatist expands our appreciation of the extent to which eighteenth-century women playwrights used the stage as a forum for exploring issues of gender.