Frances Burney

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Fanny Burney, detail of an oil painting by her brother, E.F. Burney; in the National Portrait … (credit: Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born June 13, 1752, King's Lynn, Norfolk, Eng. — died Jan. 6, 1840, London) English novelist. The self-educated daughter of Charles Burney, she wrote lively accounts of his social musical evenings. Her habit of recording observations of society led to Evelina (1778), an epistolary novel about an unsure young girl's social development; a landmark in the evolution of the novel of manners, it pointed the way to Jane Austen's novels. Her later novels include Cecilia (1782) and the potboiler Camilla (1796).

For more information on Fanny Burney d'Arblay, visit Britannica.com.

The English novelist and diarist Fanny Burney (1752-1840) was one of the most popular novelists of the late 18th century. She was also an important chronicler of English manners, morals, and society.

Fanny Burney, originally named Frances, was the daughter of Dr. Charles Burney, the distinguished historian of music. She captured London's literary society with the publication of Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, the best of her four extant novels. Although she had begun to compose Evelina as early as 1767, she did not publish it until 1778, and then only anonymously. The heroine's search for a father and a husband exposes both the vanity and affectation of life among the upper class and the vulgarity and lack of feeling which she associates with low life. An effective novel told in letters, it displays Burney's wit, knowledge of English society, technical versatility, sentiment, interest in contemporary theater, and gift for depicting character.

Evelina won Burney admission to the salons of the great and famous, many of whom she described vividly in her diaries and journals. From 1787 to 1791 she served as second keeper of the robes to Queen Charlotte. In 1793 she married Gen. d'Arblay, a French refugee, with whom she lived in France from 1802 to 1812.

Her priceless record of life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is preserved in what she called an "immense Mass of Manuscripts," consisting of diaries, journals, notebooks, and a voluminous correspondence begun in her fifteenth year.

Before publishing her second novel, Cecilia, in 1782, Burney had written and abandoned a comedy entitled The Witlings. While the immensely popular Ceciliaaga in shows Burney's mastery of plot, it is both less comic and more sentimental than Evelina. Melodramatic scenes, revealing the influence of the contemporary stage, frame Cecilia Beverley's efforts to marry young Delvile.

Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814) lack narrative interest and are perhaps better considered courtesy books than novels. Camilla teaches the lessons of propriety, prudence, and fortitude to a young girl; The Wanderer depicts the difficulties faced by a penniless and unprotected spinster trying to earn her living in England.

In 1832 Fanny Burney published three volumes of the Memoirs of Dr. Burney, a project begun in 1814. Seven volumes of The Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay, published between 1842 and 1846, and two volumes of The Early Diary of Francis Burney, not published until 1907, reveal her pert and astute observations about fashionable life in Georgian England.

Further Reading

The authoritative biographical study of Fanny Burney is Joyce Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney (1958). Her major works are discussed in J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (1932); Lionel Stevenson, The English Novel: A Panorama (1960); and Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth Century England (1967). Recommended for general background reading are J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1951); A. R. Humphreys, The Augustan World: Life and Letters in Eighteenth Century England (1954); and lan P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957).

Burney, Frances (Fanny) (1752-1840). Novelist and dramatist. Frances was a daughter of music historian Charles Burney, in whose circle she met Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. A quiet observer of mankind, her first novel, Evelina, was published anonymously in 1778 and well received. The second, Cecilia, in 1782, brought her society introductions, which led to a minor appointment at the court of Queen Charlotte in 1786. Five years later, to the surprise of her friends and family, she married General d'Arblay, an impoverished French refugee. Between 1802 and 1812 they lived in France, and at the time of Waterloo she was in Brussels.

Burney, Frances (Mme. d'Arblay; 1752–1840), celebrated English novelist, diarist, playwright. The daughter of music historian Charles Burney, Frances was born in King's Lynn in Norfolk, but grew up in London, where her father associated with many famous literary figures including Samuel Johnson and his "Club" and members of the Blue Stocking Circle, an informal group of learned women who, during the 1750s, held receptions for important literary figures and met to discuss art and literature.

Burney started writing in 1768 when she began keeping a journal (addressed "to nobody") that she continued to keep for the rest of her life. In 1778, she published her first novel, Evelina, or a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, having written it in secret and arranged for it to be published anonymously. The story of a naïve and innocent young woman introduced into fashionable, and often eccentric, aristocratic London society, Evelina was an instant success. When the London Review reported that "there is much more merit, as well respecting stile, character & Incident, than is usually to be met with in modern Novels," Burney felt confident to confess to her father that she was its author, and she was subsequently introduced into London literary society, with the help of Samuel Johnson's friend Hester Thrale, as an accomplished novelist.

Encouraged by her celebrated arrival on the literary scene, Burney's writing career took off. In 1782 she published her second novel, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress. The story of a young woman with a large fortune in search of a suitable husband, Cecilia was immensely successful, being an accurate reflection of the eighteenth-century marriage market. Having begun, and then abandoned, her first play, The Witlings, in 1778, Burney was exhausted by the writing of Cecilia and did not complete any further novels or plays for six years.

In 1786, following a number of unsuccessful courtships, Burney was offered, and accepted, a position as second keeper of the robes to Queen Charlotte, moving into the queen's lodge in Windsor in June that year. Upholding this position until poor health forced her to retire in 1791, Burney dutifully recorded her years as a member of the royal household in her Court Journals. During this time she also wrote more plays, including the tragedy Edwy and Elgiva, which was staged at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1795, though it survived only one performance. Other plays quickly followed: Hubert de Vere and The Siege of Pevensey in 1790, and the incomplete Elberta in 1791.

Having left the royal household, Burney began a secret courtship with a French Catholic General, Alexander d'Arblay, who was living in exile in England. They married in 1793, and continued to live in England, during which time Burney completed and published (1796) her third novel, Camilla, or a Picture of Youth, which, like her two earlier novels, told the story of the entrance into society of a beautiful, intelligent, but inexperienced young woman. Two years later she wrote another play, this time a comedy, Love and Fashion, which was accepted for Covent Garden Theatre but never performed. In 1800 she wrote two more comic plays, A Busy Day and The Woman-Hater, neither of which were performed in her lifetime.

In 1802, when General d'Arblay felt it was safe to return home and recover his family estates, he and Burney moved to France, where they lived in Paris for ten years. During this time, Burney's health deteriorated and she realized she was suffering from breast cancer. In 1811 she underwent a mastectomy without anesthetic, and, remarkably, lived to enjoy relative good health and record the details of her operation in a frank and extraordinary letter to her sister.

In 1812 Burney and her husband returned to England. Two years later she published her fourth and final novel, The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties, which did not enjoy anything like the success of her earlier works. The remainder of her life was spent in London and Bath; in 1832 she published the Memoirs of Doctor Burney, as well as her father's papers, and edited her own journals and letters in preparation for their likely publication after her death. She died in London in 1840, outliving most of her family and, to an extent, her literary reputation. The Diaries and Letters of Madame D'Arblay (1778–1840), edited by her niece Charlotte Barrett, was published in seven volumes in London, 1842–1846, confirming her reputation as one of the eighteenth century's most important novelists, and her importance as an inspiration for later woman writers like Jane Austen, who greatly admired her works.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Burney, Fanny. Camilla, or A Picture of Youth. Edited by Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom. Oxford and New York, 1983.

——. Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress. Edited by Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody. Oxford, 1988.

——. The Complete Plays of Frances Burney. Edited by Peter Sabor and Stewart J. Cooke. 2 vols. London, 1995.

——. The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. Edited by Lars E. Troide. Oxford and New York, 1988–.

——. Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. Edited by Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom. Oxford and New York, 1982.

——. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay). Edited by Joyce Hemlow. 12 vols. Oxford, 1972–1984.

——. The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties. Edited by Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor. Oxford and New York, 1991.

Secondary Sources

Cutting-Gray, Joanne. Woman as "Nobody" and the Novels of Fanny Burney. Gainesville, Fla., 1992.

Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.

Epstein, Julia L. The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing. Madison, Wis., 1989.

Grau, Joseph A. Fanny Burney: An Annotated Bibliography. New York, 1981.

Harman, Claire. Fanny Burney: A Biography. London and New York, 2000.

Straub, Kristina. Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy. Lexington, Ky., 1987.

—ALISON STENTON

Quotes:

"For my part, I confess I seldom listen to the players: one has so much to do, in looking about and finding out one's acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage. One merely comes to meet one's friends, and show that one's alive."

"There is no looking at a building here after seeing Italy."