Frances Burney

Also known as Fanny Burney or Lady D’Arblay. 13 June 1752 (London)-1840. Novelist and playwright, also famous for her posthumously published letters and diaries.

Novelist

Frances Burney decided to be a novelist in a time when novels were the least prestigious kind of literature and she was aware of that. “She wrote her novels with a mixture of doubt and daring, and remained all her life ambivalent about novels and the practice of fiction” (Devlin 15).

Her early work Evelina (anonymously published in 1778) is considered a landmark in the development of the novel of manners as it comments on social life in England and illustrates Burney’s ability of “observing and recording society” (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Although she never had a formal education she taught herself to read and spend a lot of time in her father’s library. She was an intelligent and talented woman but “publicly, she always maintained the demeanour appropriate to eighteenth-century expectations of women’s behaviour” (Simons 6).

However, all of her novels were a huge success in her time and she became very famous.

Her novels Cecilia and Camilla were even mentioned by Jane Austen in her novel Northanger Abbey.

Life at Court

From 1786 to 1791 Frances Burney also spent some time at the English court, as the Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte. But court life did not agree with her as she was neither interested in royalty nor in fashion. In the end isolation from her friends and family and courtly routine exhausted her. During those five years she wrote her four tragedies, which were not as successful as her novels. She was allowed to leave court because her health suffered from it.

Marriage and Life in France

In 1793 she married Alexandre d’Arblay, a “gentle and cultured” French émigré. It was a marriage based on love. They had one son. Only on the proceeds of her novel Camilla could they afford a proper lifestyle, as Alexandre did not have any money. While on a visit to France she was forced to stay there for ten years by the renewed Napoleonic Wars. Her experience of living in a strange society all by herself while her husband was at war led her to write her last fictional work, the novel The Wanderer, which was published upon her return to England in 1814.

After her death on January 6 1840 her journals and letters were published in nine volumes. Up until today they have proven to be “source-books of material about people, places, and manners” of Frances Burney’s time (Adelstein, preface).

References

Adelstein, Michael E.: Fanny Burney. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968.

Devlin, D.D.: The Novels and Journals of Fanny Burney. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987.

Simons, Judy: Fanny Burney. London: Macmillan, 1987.

Encyclopaedia Britannica http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/85638/Fanny-Burney