In her long life that spanned five reigns, Frances Burney d'Arblay (1752-1840) created a new genre in the English novel, chronicled events         ranging from George III's mad crisis to the aftermath of Waterloo, and wrote comedies that could have rivalled Sheridan's had they been           produced.
  Fanny educated herself by omnivorous reading at home. Her literary apprenticeship was much influenced by her father’s friend Samuel           Crisp, a disappointed author living in retirement. It was to “Daddy” Crisp that she addressed her first journal letters, lively accounts of the     musical evenings at the Burneys’ London house where the elite among European performers entertained informally for gatherings that           might include David Garrick, Dr. Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Richard Sheridan. Considered the least promising of the clever Burney               children, Fanny moved unnoticed in the circles of the great, confiding her observations to Crisp.
  She was born in June, in King's Lynn, Norfolk,on Tuesday 13, 1752. She  was a Gemini, and her ethnicity was  White.

  She was the daughter of Esther Sleepe Burney and music historian Dr. Charles Burney. Her mother, Esther (nee Sleepe) was granddaughter     of a  French refugee named Dubois. Fanny was the fourth child in a family of six. Of her brothers, James (1750-1821) became an admiral and     sailed with Captain James Cook on his second and third voyages, and Charles Burney was a well-known classical scholar. In 1760 the family        moved to London, and Dr Burney, a fashionable music master, took a house in Poland Street. Mrs Burney died in 1761, when Fanny was only   nine years old. Her sisters Esther (Hetty), afterwards Mrs Charles Rousseau, and Susanna, afterwards Mrs Phillips, were sent to school  in         Paris, but Fanny was largely self-educated.


  From the time she learned her alphabet, she was a writer, composing odes, plays, songs, farces, and poems at an early age. She burned           them all at age 15, most likely under the influence of her stepmother, who didn't think it appropriate for women to write. But Frances           Burney's urge to write could not be stifled. At age 16, she began the diary that would chronicle personal and public events from the early       reign of George III to the dawn of the Victoria age. These included first-hand accounts of the Johnson-Boswell circle, the trial of Warren        Hastings, George III's mad crisis, Napoleonic France, a mastectomy without anaesthesia, and the aftermath of the battle of Waterloo, which   found her nursing the stream of English wounded evacuated from the battlefield.
  She knew luminaries such as David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson through her father, and her early             diaries chronicle evenings spent in this circle at home.

   Early in 1766 she paid her first visit to Dr Burney's friend Samuel Crisp at Chessington Hall in Surrey. Dr Burney had first made Crisp's                 acquaintance in about 1745 at the house of Fulke Greville, and they had studied music together. Crisp's play, Virginia, staged by David            Garrick in 1754 at the request of the beautiful countess of Coventry (née Maria Gunning), had been unsuccessful, and Crisp had retired to       Chessington Hall, where he frequently entertained Dr Burney and his family, to whom he was familiarly known as "daddy" Crisp. It was to        her "daddy" Crisp and her sister Susan that Fanny Burney addressed large portions of her diary and many of her letters. In 1767, Dr                    Burney married Elizabeth Allen, widow of a King's Lynn wine-merchant. Fanny lived in the midst of an exceptionally brilliant social circle,        gathered round her father in Poland Street, and later at his new home in St Martin's Street, Leicester Fields. Garrick was a constant visitor.    Of the various "lyons" they entertained she leaves a graphic account, notably of Omai, the Otaheitan native, and of Alexis Orlov, the                favourite of Catherine II of Russia. She first met Samuel Johnson at her father's home in March 1777.
 
   Her father's drawing-room, where she met many of the chief musicians, actors and authors of the day, was Fanny's only school, but he had     a huge library; Macaulay stated that in the whole of Dr Burney's library there was only one novel; Fielding's Amelia. Fanny was acquainted       with the Abbé Prévost's Doyen de Killérine, and with Marivaux's Vie de Marianne, besides Samuel Richardson's Clarissa the books of Mrs           Elizabeth Griffith and Mrs Frances Brooke. Her diary contains the record of her reading. Her stepmother discouraged of scribbling, so              Fanny made a bonfire of her manuscripts, among them a History of Caroline Evelyn, a story containing an account of Evelina's mother.              Luckily her journal survived. The first entry in it was made on May 30 1768, and it extended over seventy-two years. The earlier parts were    savagely edited in later days, and much was obliterated. Her first novel, Evelina or A Young Lady's Entrance into the World was planned out    long before it was written down. It was published by Thomas Lowndes in January 1778, but it was not until June that Dr Burney learned its    authorship, whe  the book had been reviewed and praised everywhere. It was written in secret and in a disguised hand because publishers    were familiar with her handwriting through her work as an amanuensis for her father. Fanny proudly told Hester Thrale the secret. Hester      Thrale wrote to Dr Burney on  July 22: "Mr Johnson returned home full of the Prayes of the Book I had lent him, and protesting that there      were passages in it which might do honour to Richardson: we talk of it for ever, and he feels ardent after the denouement; he could not        get rid of the Rogue, he said." Miss Burney soon visited the Thrales at Streatham Place, "the most consequential day I have spent since my    birth" she calls the occasion. It    was the prelude to much longer visits there. Dr Johnson's best compliments were eagerly transcribed in        her diary. His affectionate friendship for "little Burney" only    ceased with his death.

   With Evelina, she created a new school of fiction in English, one in which women in society were portrayed in realistic, contemporary            circumstances. She brought new dynamism to portrayals of personal relationships and familiar home life. The "comedy of  manners" genre in    which she worked paved the way for Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and other 19th-century writers. Evelina's mix of  social comedy,              realism, and wit made it an instant success, keeping Edmund Burke up all night reading and leading London society to  speculate on the          identity of the writer, who was universally assumed to be a man.
   Evelina was a continued success (even Queen Charlotte and the royal princesses were allowed to read the book) reconciled her father to        his daughter's authorship. She was taken up by literary and high society and became the first woman to make writing novels respectable.       Sir Joshua Reynolds sat up all night to read it, as did Edmund Burke, who came next to Johnson in Miss Burney's esteem. She was                    introduced to Elizabeth Montagu and the other bluestocking ladies, to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and to the gay Mrs Mary Cholmondeley,        the sister of Peg Woffington, whose manners, as described in the diary, explain much of Evelina. At the suggestion of Hester Thrale, and        with offers of help from Arthur Murphy and encouragement from Sheridan, Fanny began to write a comedy. Crisp, realizing the limitations      of her powers, tried to dissuade her, and the piece, The Witlings, was suppressed in deference to the views of "her two 'daddies.'"                Only one of her eight plays would ever be produced.

   Meanwhile her friendship with Hester Thrale left her little time for writing. She went with her to Bath in 1780, and was at Streatham              Place again in 1781. Her next book was written partly at Chessington and after much discussion with Mr Crisp. Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an          Heiress,by the author of Evelina, was published in 5 vols. in 1782 by Messrs Payne & Cadell (who paid the author £250) and earned her more    fame, even Napoleon would read it and compliment her husband, General Alexandre d'Arblay, about it. Cecilia is more skilfully constructed      than Evelina, it is more carefully constructed, and contains many examples of what Johnson called Miss Burney's gift' of                                    "character-mongering." Burke sent her a letter full of high praise. Some of her friends found the writing too closely modelled on Samuel           Johnson's, and Horace Walpole thought the personages spoke too uniformly in character.
   Jane Austen took the title of Pride and Prejudice from the closing chapter of Cecilia, and the plot of Pride and Prejudice has some                  noticeable similarities with that of Cecilia.
   Her first theatrical comedy, The Witlings, was, however, surpressed by her father, even though Sheridan had agreed to produce it. While       novel writing was now deemed at least somewhat respectable for women, writing for the theatre was out of bounds for Dr. Burney's               daughter. Frances Burney saw one tragedy, Edwy and Elgiva, produced during her lifetime. The rest of her plays would have to wait until       the late 20th century before a critical assessment could be made of them. All but two of her plays were published for the first time only in      1995.

   On April 24, 1783, Fanny Burney's "most judicious adviser and stimulating critic," "daddy" Crisp, died. He was her devoted friend, as she was    to him, "the dearest thing on earth." The next year she was to lose two more friends. Hester Thrale re-married, and Samuel Johnson died.      Fanny had met the celebrated Mrs Delany in 1783, and she now attached herself to her. Mrs Delany, who was living (1785) in a house near        Windsor Castle presented to her by George III, was on the friendliest terms with both the King and Queen, and Fanny was honoured with      more than one royal interview.

   Queen Charlotte, soon afterwards, offered Miss Burney the post of second keeper of the robes, with a salary of £200 a year, which after         some hesitation was accepted. Dr Burney was criticised for allowing the authoress of Evelina and Cecilia to undertake an office which            meant separation from all her friends and a wearisome round of court ceremonial, but it has been argued that Fanny's literary gifts were          limited.
   Novel writing for Frances Burney ceased during the five years (1786-91) that she was assistant Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, ,        and felt she had used her best material. Her diaries chronicle much detail about the royal family and court life, including George III's sanity      crisis. She began a number of her tragedies during these years.
   "What my daddy Crisp says," she wrote as early as 1779, "that it would be the best policy, but for pecuniary advantages, for me to write no    more, is exactly what I have always thought since Evelina was published". Her misgivings as to her unfitness for court life were quite              justified. From Queen Charlotte she received nothing   but kindness, despite her inadequacy as a waiting-maid. She had to attend the            queen's toilet, to take care of her lap-dog and her snuff-box, and to help her senior, Mrs Schwellenberg, in entertaining the king's equerries    and visitors at tea. Mrs Schwellenberg has been described as "a peevish old person of uncertain temper and impaired health, swaddled in        the buckram of backstairs etiquette", and this was the worst part of Fanny's duties. Her diary is full of amusing court gossip, and sometimes    deals with graver matters, notably in the account of Warren Hastings' trial, and in the story of the beginning of George III's madness, as          seen by a member of his household. On one famous occasion, she was chased by him at Kew Palace, an incident that at first frightened          her.
   The strain told on her health, and Dr Burney prepared with her a joint memorial asking the queen's leave to resign. She left the royal               service in July 1791 with a retiring pension of £100 a year, granted from the queen's private purse, and returned to her father's house at          Chelsea. (Dr Burney had been appointed organist at Chelsea Hospital in 1783.) In 1792 Fanny became acquainted with a group of French          exiles, who had taken a house, Juniper Hall, near Mickleham, where Fanny's sister, Mrs Phillips, lived.
  
   On July 31, 1793 against her father's wishes, she married one of the exiles, Alexandre D'Arblay, an artillery officer, who had been                      adjutant-general to La Fayette after the rise of Robespierre. They took a cottage at Bookham on the strength of Fanny's pension. In 1793        she produced her Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy. The couple had one son, Alexandre, who was born on December    18 1794, and were extraordinarily devoted to each other.

   In 1795, her play, Edwy and Elgiva, was produced. Her third novel, Camilla, was published by subscription in 1796. The 36-page subscription    list reads like a who's who of late 18th-century English society. Among the subscribers was a Miss J. Austen, Steventon. It is believed that      the only time Jane Austen's name appeared in print during her lifetime was as a subscriber to Burney's third novel.
   Fanny returned to England and published another novel, The Wanderer (1814). She remained in Britain for the rest of her life,  
   In hopes of recovering property lost during the French Revolution, Gen. d'Arblay moved his family to France in 1802, a temporar                       arrangement that lasted 10 years because the Peace of Amiens ended while the family was still in France. While there, Frances Burney            d'Arblay made medical history by chronicling her mastectomy without anaesthesia. Also, during this time, she wrote her fourth and final          novel, The Wanderer, published in 1814 after the family returned to England for the rest of their life. The book, although not well-received    by reviewers at the time, has recently received new attention for its realistic, pre-Victoria portrayal of conditions for working women.

   The next year, she remained near her husband, who was fighting with French Royalists against Napoleon, and refused to flee Brussels when    rumours swept through that Napoleon had won at Waterloo. She stayed and helped nurse the English wounded that streamed off the             battlefield for weeks afterward. Scholars believe that Thackeray drew upon her accounts of this period for scenes in Vanity Fair, published    in 1848.
   After her father's death in 1814 and her husband's death in 1818, Frances Burney d'Arblay wrote no more fiction. Her literary effort until          the  end of her life focused on a memoir of her father, published in 1832, and the editing of her own now monumental papers, which              were first published as the Letters and Diaries of Madame d'Arblay after her death in 1840.
   She died on Monday, January 06, 1840, in London; and the  cause of death is  unspecified.

   Although heavily bowdlerized versions of the diaries and letters were published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it wasn't until          Dr.Joyce Hemlow published her landmark biography, The History of Fanny Burney, in 1958 that the full impact of her contribution to                literature  and letters began to be better appreciated. Dr. Hemlow's 12-volume Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay),          which covers the years from 1791 to 1840, also made a great contribution to the contemporary recognition of Burney's canonical status and    an excellent account of English culture. The early diaries,    complete for the first time, are currently published in a series edited by Dr.          Lars Troide, Dr. Stewart Cooke, Dr. Betty Rizzo, and others. Critical appreciation of Frances Burney's novels and plays continues to grow,        sparked by new interest in 18th-century women writers.
   The theme of Burney's books is the entry into society of a virtuous but inexperienced young girl, her mistakes, and her gradual coming of        age.
   Burney's four novels have earned her favorable comparisons to other giants of the genre-Austen, Richardson, Dickens-and Virginia Woolf's      declaration that she is "the mother of English fiction." If a best-seller and a celebrity in her own day, it is as a diarist that Burney is now         best known-one who was eye-witness to The Madness of King George, and who enlivened the later years of Samuel Johnson.

 

Get the Flash Player to see this player.