Fanny Burney

English · 1752 to 1840

Born Frances Burney on June 13, 1752, in King's Lynn, Norfolk, England, she was the third child of the music historian Charles Burney and his first wife, Esther Sleepe. Her mother died when Frances was ten, and the girl, thought slow and shy by her family, taught herself to read late and was the only Burney child sent to no school. She wrote in secret. At fifteen, fearing her stepmother's disapproval, she burned an early manuscript called The History of Caroline Evelyn in a bonfire in the garden. From its ashes grew Evelina (1778), published anonymously, a comic novel in letters about a young woman's entrance into the world, which became the sensation of the season before anyone knew the author was a shy clergyman's daughter. Samuel Johnson praised it, and Burney joined his circle, becoming a favorite of his and of the bluestocking Hester Thrale. Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796), the latter sold by subscription with the young Jane Austen among the subscribers, secured her reputation and a measure of independence. From 1786 she served five unhappy years as Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, escaping only on grounds of failing health. In 1793 she married Alexandre d'Arblay, a penniless French emigre general, and lived with him in France during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1811 she underwent a mastectomy without anesthetic and later described the operation in a letter of harrowing precision. Her last novel, The Wanderer (1814), failed, but her voluminous journals and letters, spanning seventy years, became her enduring achievement. She died on January 6, 1840, in London, at the age of eighty-seven.