She had very little inventive power; her best novel, _Evelina_, has no plot worth speaking of.

She never wrote really well.

Even the _Diary_ derives its whole charm from the matter and the _reportage.

Evelina_ is tolerable style of the kind that has no style; _Cecilia_ is pompous and Johnsonian; _Camilla_ was stigmatised by the competent and affectionate judgment of Mrs.Delany as "Gallicised;" and _The Wanderer_ is in a lingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French original by a person who does not know English.
[12] Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that intense concentration on herself and her family with which, after their quarrel, Mrs.Thrale, not quite an impartial judge, but a very shrewd one, charged her, and which does appear in the _Diary_.
What then was it in _Evelina_, and in part in _Cecilia_ (with a faint survival even into _Camilla_), which turned the heads of such a "town" as Johnson and Burke, Walpole and Windham, and many others--which, to persons who can see it, makes the books attractive to-day, and which should always give their author a secure and distinguished place in the great torch-race of English fiction-writers?
It is this--that Miss Burney had a quite marvellous faculty of taking impressions of actual speech, manners, and to a certain extent character: that she had, at any rate for a time, a corresponding faculty of expressing, or at least reporting, her impressions.

Next (and perhaps most of all) that she had the luck to come at a moment when speech and manners were turning to the modern; and lastly, that she was content, in parts of her work at any rate, to let her faculty of expression work, automatically and uninterfered with, on the impressions: and thereby give us record of them for all time.