Journals and Letters

To Nobody, she wrote, being fifteen and having nowhere else to put it all. Frances Burney kept that habit for seventy years, and what she set down is the closest thing English has to a life lived twice: the morning in Kew Gardens when a mad George III came after her across the grass, calling her name until she stopped running; the five years the author of Evelina spent minding a queen's dresses and dying of the tedium; Brussels in the week of Waterloo, the wounded coming back through the streets.