Fanny Burney (1752–1840)
Author of Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World
About the Author
Frances ("Fanny") Burney 1752 - 1840 Frances Burney also known as Fanny Burney and, after her marriage, as Madame d'Arblay, was an English novelist, diarist and playwright. She was born on June 13, 1752 and wrote four novels (Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer). Her first novel was written show more anonymously in 1778, without her father¿s knowledge or permission. After it became a literary success, she admitted to her father that she was the author. Her novels were read by many, including Jane Austen whose title Pride and Prejudice was formed from reading the last pages of Burney's novel, Cecilia. Burney is more well known for her journals. She kept a diary for 72 years. In these diaries she recounts a first-hand look at English society in the 18th Century. In 1810 when she suffered from breast pain, it was believed that she had breast cancer; she elected to have a mastectomy performed. This procedure is retold in her journals, and as there was no anesthesia at the time and she was conscious throughout, the entries for this mastectomy are very compelling. In 1793 Burney married General Alexandre d'Arblay, a French general to Lafayette. They had one child, Alexander. In her later years, Burney lived in Bath, England. She is buried there in Walcot Cemetery with her husband and son. Burney died on January 6, 1840 at 87 years of age. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Disambiguation Notice:
Do not combine her with her niece and namesake Frances Burney (1776–1828), a governess known to have written one work, Tragic Dramas (1818).
Image credit: Engraving by Charles Turner, published 1840
Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery
(image use requires permission from the New York Public Library)
Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery
(image use requires permission from the New York Public Library)
Series
Works by Fanny Burney
The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay) Volume II: Courtship and Marriage. 1793: Letters 40-121 (1972) 3 copies
Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Vol. 3: The Streatham Years: Part 1, 1778-1779 (1994) 3 copies
Brief reflections relative to the emigrant French clergy : earnestly submitted to the humane consideration of the ladies of Great Britain (2012) 3 copies
The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay): Volume III: Great Bookham, 1793-1797 Letters 122-250 (1973) 3 copies
Evelina Tomo II 2 copies
Sophia of Suffolk 2 copies
The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay): Volume VI: France, 1803-1812 Letters 550-631 (1976) 2 copies
Camilla. Vol 1 2 copies
Camilla: or, a picture of youth. By the author of Evelina and Cecilia. In five volumes. ... Volume 5 of 5 (2010) 2 copies
The Complete Works of Frances Burney. Illustrated: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla and others (2025) 1 copy
SST 55 - Evelina 1 copy
Works of Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay), Precursor to Jane Austen, Samizdat Edition (Annotated) (2011) 1 copy
The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay): Volume VII: 1812-1814 Letters 632-834 (1978) 1 copy
The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay) Volume X; Bath 1817-1818: Letters 1086-1179 (2014) 1 copy
Associated Works
The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists (2000) — Contributor, some editions — 624 copies, 9 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Burney, Fanny
- Legal name
- Burney, Frances
- Other names
- Madame d'Arblay (married name)
Burney, Fanny - Birthdate
- 1752-06-13
- Date of death
- 1840-01-06
- Gender
- female
- Education
- homeschooled
- Occupations
- novelist
playwright
diarist
courtier - Organizations
- Bluestocking Society
- Relationships
- Burney, Charles (father)
Burney, James (brother)
Burney, Sarah Harriet (half-sister)
Maitland, Julia Charlotte (great-niece) - Short biography
- Frances "Fanny" Burney was the daughter of a well-known musicologist. She basically educated herself at home by her reading, and began writing at age 10. Her home in London was a center for musical gatherings attended and performed by elite English and European artists and musicians, and Fanny observed and moved easily among these personalities. She became an extremely popular and bestselling author whose works were admired by Samuel Johnson, Hester Thrale, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and many other literary lights. Her first novel Evelina (1778), proved to be her greatest success and is still read today. In 1786, she was given a post at Court serving Queen Charlotte. She met and married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay, and went with him to France, where she lived for 10 years. She's sometimes referred to as Madame d'Arblay. After her husband's death in 1818, she returned to London. An edition of her journals and letters in eight volumes was published in 1972–1980.
- Nationality
- Great Britain
- Birthplace
- King's Lynn, Norfolk, England, UK
- Places of residence
- King's Lynn, Norfolk, England, UK
London, Middlesex, England, UK
Leicester, Leicestershire, England, UK
Paris, Île-de-France, France
Bath, Somerset, England, UK - Place of death
- Bath, Somerset, England, UK
- Burial location
- Walcot Cemetery, Bath, Somerset, England, UK
- Map Location
- England, UK
- Disambiguation notice
- Do not combine her with her niece and namesake Frances Burney (1776–1828), a governess known to have written one work, Tragic Dramas (1818).
Members
Discussions
Group read: The Wanderer by Frances Burney in Virago Modern Classics (October 2018)
Group read: Camilla by Frances Burney in Virago Modern Classics (June 2018)
Group read: Cecilia by Fanny Burney in Virago Modern Classics (January 2016)
Group read: Evelina by Fanny Burney in 75 Books Challenge for 2015 (July 2015)
Burney's Evelina in 1001 Books to read before you die (July 2007)
Reviews
We need to get a couple of things out of the way before I get to the proper review.
i) This is too long.
ii) This shouldn't be read the way you'd read a Hemingway novel--sitting down and intensely fretting through the intense pages of intensity. This should be read the way you watch a TV series: a few chapters here, a few there, letting the various plots lines wrap themselves up, taking a pause while the next one gets going, all the while keeping in mind that there is an overarching point to show more the thing, but not expecting that overarching point to be the focus of every chapter, let alone every sentence.
Now, having said all that, this is fabulous stuff. Burney gives you exactly what you want from a late eighteenth century novel: heart-rending sentiment, burning satire, and intelligent sociology. The characters are well drawn, and don't 'develop,' because they are people, not characters in a fiction-writing workshop, and people don't develop like that. But they do get entangled in plot, and that's what Burney gives us: incident after incident, all leading us towards a crisis point, whether local (as when Cecilia finally moves out of her first guardian's house) or more general (as at the end of the novel).
Mr. Gosport is an interesting innovation, if you're interested in that kind of thing--he's the intelligent voice of the novel, but he's not particularly involved in anything. In fact, he's really there to let Burney write satirical, sociological essays about the upper class, and they are wonderful things, perhaps the best parts of the book.
Burney was well known to Austen ('Pride and Prejudice' is a phrase from this very book), and that might have skewed some readers' expectations for the worse. Austen is a wonderful novelist, who made genuine advances in the art, but Burney was working in a very different form, from a very different perspective. It's best to know this before diving into this monster of a book; this is not Our Jane. But if you give up looking for Austen, you're likely to find any number of other novelists in there: the Delviles feel like something from late James, for instance, and Mr. Monckton would find himself quite at home in a Trollope novel.
In short, then, Burney was a writer of genius, who had the misfortune to write just before another writer, with a very different genius, changed our expectations of the novel, so that Burney can now feel excessive and even unartistic. But there are real rewards to reading Cecilia. show less
i) This is too long.
ii) This shouldn't be read the way you'd read a Hemingway novel--sitting down and intensely fretting through the intense pages of intensity. This should be read the way you watch a TV series: a few chapters here, a few there, letting the various plots lines wrap themselves up, taking a pause while the next one gets going, all the while keeping in mind that there is an overarching point to show more the thing, but not expecting that overarching point to be the focus of every chapter, let alone every sentence.
Now, having said all that, this is fabulous stuff. Burney gives you exactly what you want from a late eighteenth century novel: heart-rending sentiment, burning satire, and intelligent sociology. The characters are well drawn, and don't 'develop,' because they are people, not characters in a fiction-writing workshop, and people don't develop like that. But they do get entangled in plot, and that's what Burney gives us: incident after incident, all leading us towards a crisis point, whether local (as when Cecilia finally moves out of her first guardian's house) or more general (as at the end of the novel).
Mr. Gosport is an interesting innovation, if you're interested in that kind of thing--he's the intelligent voice of the novel, but he's not particularly involved in anything. In fact, he's really there to let Burney write satirical, sociological essays about the upper class, and they are wonderful things, perhaps the best parts of the book.
Burney was well known to Austen ('Pride and Prejudice' is a phrase from this very book), and that might have skewed some readers' expectations for the worse. Austen is a wonderful novelist, who made genuine advances in the art, but Burney was working in a very different form, from a very different perspective. It's best to know this before diving into this monster of a book; this is not Our Jane. But if you give up looking for Austen, you're likely to find any number of other novelists in there: the Delviles feel like something from late James, for instance, and Mr. Monckton would find himself quite at home in a Trollope novel.
In short, then, Burney was a writer of genius, who had the misfortune to write just before another writer, with a very different genius, changed our expectations of the novel, so that Burney can now feel excessive and even unartistic. But there are real rewards to reading Cecilia. show less
This is the last novel Frances Burney wrote and, for some reason, the only one not currently in print which I think is a shame because for me this is the strongest of her novels (although not necessarily the easiest to read).
Published in 1814 (the same year as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park) but written more in an 18th century style and set mostly in England in 1793 against the background of the French Revolution, [The Wanderer] sets out how difficult it was for young women to survive at that show more time without the protection of a man or money (which generally also came from a man).
From a modern day viewpoint the book suffers from some repetitiveness in that Burney makes her heroine repeatedly try different solutions to her difficulties only to fail at each attempt but from an 18th/19th century perspective the point needed to be repeated. And whilst women now (thankfully) have more financial independence, the repeated themes of women being threatened by men, mistreated by men and doubted by men sadly felt all too relevant as I was reading this over the summer. So, not exactly a cheerful book despite the convenient 'happy' ending but I think an important one and one that deserves more attention (and an edition in print). show less
Published in 1814 (the same year as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park) but written more in an 18th century style and set mostly in England in 1793 against the background of the French Revolution, [The Wanderer] sets out how difficult it was for young women to survive at that show more time without the protection of a man or money (which generally also came from a man).
From a modern day viewpoint the book suffers from some repetitiveness in that Burney makes her heroine repeatedly try different solutions to her difficulties only to fail at each attempt but from an 18th/19th century perspective the point needed to be repeated. And whilst women now (thankfully) have more financial independence, the repeated themes of women being threatened by men, mistreated by men and doubted by men sadly felt all too relevant as I was reading this over the summer. So, not exactly a cheerful book despite the convenient 'happy' ending but I think an important one and one that deserves more attention (and an edition in print). show less
Great fun, if a little clumsy in parts. Burney obviously had technical problems with the different voices needed for the epistolary form, so the book ends up as essentially a first-person narrative by Evelina with occasional letters from other characters interspersed here and there. But this doesn't matter: although she is sometimes an irritatingly dense character, Evelina is always a very lively narrator. The comic characters are great as well, even though they are all a bit stagey. The show more plot races along and the resolution has a very theatrical quality about it: you can just imagine an audience groaning with pleasurable vexation as they discover who are the long-lost siblings, and which babies were switched at birth...
If you look at this as a stepping-stone from Richardson, Smollett and Fielding to the fiction of the 19th century, there's a lot to engage with. Something I found very interesting was the representation of class. We normally think of Georgian society as grandees at the top, peasants and the urban poor at the bottom, and everyone else more-or-less at the same level in the middle, but in this novel the plot relies heavily on the contrast between the social standards of Villars and the Mirvans on the one hand and Mme Duval and the Branghtons on the other. The former are minor gentry, and model their behaviour and values on those of the aristocracy; the latter are in trade, and are much more free and easy in their manners (for instance, the Branghton girls can go around unchaperoned with young men, whilst Evelina and Molly Mirvan would never think of doing so). The interesting thing is that Burney is describing a period when these two groups exist closely together, multiply linked to each other by marriage, and characters like Evelina and Captain Mirvan find themselves moving (albeit sometimes uncomfortably) back and forth between the two. By the time we get to Dickens and Thackeray, this gap has become a lot bigger.
If you come to this novel expecting something like mature Jane Austen, as many people seem to, you'll be disappointed. The humour is clumsier, relying on slapstick rather than irony; there is too much going on; we don't have time to identify with the characters' real problems. On the other hand, if you read it on its own terms as a first novel by a clever young woman in her twenties - late 18th century chick-lit, if you will - you can get a lot of pleasure from it. show less
If you look at this as a stepping-stone from Richardson, Smollett and Fielding to the fiction of the 19th century, there's a lot to engage with. Something I found very interesting was the representation of class. We normally think of Georgian society as grandees at the top, peasants and the urban poor at the bottom, and everyone else more-or-less at the same level in the middle, but in this novel the plot relies heavily on the contrast between the social standards of Villars and the Mirvans on the one hand and Mme Duval and the Branghtons on the other. The former are minor gentry, and model their behaviour and values on those of the aristocracy; the latter are in trade, and are much more free and easy in their manners (for instance, the Branghton girls can go around unchaperoned with young men, whilst Evelina and Molly Mirvan would never think of doing so). The interesting thing is that Burney is describing a period when these two groups exist closely together, multiply linked to each other by marriage, and characters like Evelina and Captain Mirvan find themselves moving (albeit sometimes uncomfortably) back and forth between the two. By the time we get to Dickens and Thackeray, this gap has become a lot bigger.
If you come to this novel expecting something like mature Jane Austen, as many people seem to, you'll be disappointed. The humour is clumsier, relying on slapstick rather than irony; there is too much going on; we don't have time to identify with the characters' real problems. On the other hand, if you read it on its own terms as a first novel by a clever young woman in her twenties - late 18th century chick-lit, if you will - you can get a lot of pleasure from it. show less
I was torn between giving this book 3 and 4 stars. Some books simply do not age well at all, but this one, compared to other books written in the same century, does pretty decently, and is also helped by the fact that it was also written as a commentary on various social issues, instead of just a "feel-good" book like 'Pamela' (don't even get me started on that book!)
Yes... the book is still pretty sexist to women overall, but given the time period of this book, that's hardly something to be show more surprised at. Overall, as a work of 18th-century British literature, this is definitely one of the better ones. show less
Yes... the book is still pretty sexist to women overall, but given the time period of this book, that's hardly something to be show more surprised at. Overall, as a work of 18th-century British literature, this is definitely one of the better ones. show less
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