Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) is an unusual and disturbing love-story. In playing on the issue of the heroine's name, the novel illustrates the high cost of a patriarchal system. Burney exhibits her comic and satiric powers in depicting Cecilia's dismaying entry into the gilded fashionable world. Cecilia's experiences also bring her into contact with the poor and the low; running through the social analysis is an almost Dickensian forceful sympathy for those whose place in the structure of things is taken for granted. Controversial in its time, and much admired by writers as diverse as Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Choderlos de Laclos, Cecilia still retains its freshness.