In 1985 Margaret Doody opened The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered with a challenge: "English poetry of the late 17th and the 18th century has attracted many faithful readers and a number of good critics, but it still seems, among college students and the public at large, to be at a disadvantage." Despite the efforts of 50 years of critics, the 18th century remains for most readers, even (or especially) professionals, Matthew Arnold's "age of prose and reason," a silver age whose imaginative productions cannot stand beside those of the centuries before and after. (Never mind that in the 18th century itself the phrase "Age of Reason" conjured up an unholy brew of Voltaire, Tom Paine, and radical philosophy that most Englishmen deplored.) Doody excepted the novelists; perhaps Fielding and Richardson and Sterne at least had "by now been largely rescued from the opprobrium in which the whole period seemed sunk"; after all, even Augustan novelists "write about characters, about adventures and money and sex; they are entertaining, and [so] not really Augustan." But by 1988 she retracts even this exception. The flyleaf of Doody's splendid new critical biography of Fanny Burney announces her intent to treat Burney "with the seriousness usually reserved for later novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries," and the book as a whole finds it persistently necessary to argue for the variety, complexity, and ambition of works which have been systematically under-read and under-valued; indeed, Doody finds that she must combat even the view that 18th-century people were somehow less complex and interesting than more modern folk, particularly writers.