This heartfelt description of the sheer drudgery her heroine, Juliet, must endure in teaching music brings to mind Frances Burney’s own experience of her father’s punishing teaching schedule. As Margaret Doody has pointed out, in the section of The Wanderer that deals with the heroine’s career teaching music, ‘Burney was drawing on the lifelong experience of Dr. Burney as a music teacher, as well as on the teaching experiences of her musical brother-in-law, Charles Rousseau Burney, and her sister Hester.’ In an era that saw the increasing professionalization of many occupations, that of musician had an uncertain and peripheral position in the developing hierarchy, as Dr Burney’s own gradual and hard-won social ascent demonstrated. Yet at least music was one of the professions in which women could participate. As Penelope Corfield writes, ‘women played a conspicuously low-ranking role’ in the rise of the professions: ‘They were not totally excluded from the professions but were clustered in the “nurturing” branches’ – such as midwifery, nursing and, overwhelmingly, teaching; beyond these, creative professions such as authorship, acting and music offered small numbers of women a more or less precarious form of support. In this essay, I argue that Burney uses the private theatrical in The Wanderer as a vehicle through which to explore her heroine’s brief professional career as a music teacher. The private performance of Vanbrugh and Cibber’s The Provoked Husband, and in particular Juliet’s performance as Lady Townly, allows the novel to forge important connections between manners, sympathy and the status of creative professionals, connections that resonate both within the novel itself and with Burney’s own personal and familial aspirations. Studies of women’s relation to professionalization suggest that it can be seen in both pessimistic and more optimistic ways. Corfield’s conclusions about the severely limited role of women in the process of professionalization are in keeping with Clifford Siskin’s views in The Work of Writing (1998). Here he argues that the way in which modern professionalism developed allowed for the exclusion of women from the category and thus enabled the making of a particular literary history inaugurated by what he has called ‘the Great Forgetting’. Other critics, however, have seen women’s relation to professional activity