The first of only two occasions on which Jane Austen sanctioned the appearance of her name in print was in the subscription list to Burney's Camilla - a significant tribute by the aspirant 'Miss J. Austen, Steventon' to the woman novelist whose work was, by 1796, widely acknowledged to be 'without a competitor' or, if comparisons were made, to equal that of Richardson and Henry Fielding. When Austen paid tribute to Burney again, more famously, in her defence of novels in Northanger Abbey, she named Cecilia and Camilla, together with Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), as examples of works 'in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language' (I, ch. v). For modern readers, at least until twentieth-century feminist criticism rediscovered and properly reinstated women writers, Austen herself was the earliest female novelist to be allowed into the literary canon. But for contemporaries, it was Burney who first broke through the prejudices of gender and genre - her own, as well as those of her reviewers - to achieve unequivocal canonical status as a practitioner of the new form of the novel. Beginning with the acclaim which greeted the anonymous publication of Evelina in 1778, Burney's career and reputation and the emergent, but still fragile, respectability of the novel at the end of the eighteenth century are crucially interdependent. Indeed, Austen's assertive celebration of fiction not only as displaying 'the greatest powers of the mind', but also as a form whose greatest living exemplars are women, was possible largely because of the critical respect won by Burney.