46 Facts About Frances Burney

Frances Burney, known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright.

Frances Burney wrote a memoir of her father and many letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1889.

Frances Burney has gained critical respect in her own right, but she foreshadowed such novelists of manners with a satirical bent as Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray.

Frances Burney published her first novel, Evelina, anonymously in 1778.

Frances Burney followed it with Cecilia in 1782, Camilla in 1796 and The Wanderer in 1814.

All Frances Burney's novels explore the lives of English aristocrats and satirise their social pretensions and personal foibles, with an eye to larger questions such as the politics of female identity.

Frances Burney supported both herself and her family on the proceeds of her later novels, Camilla and The Wanderer.

The younger Charles Frances Burney became a well-known classical scholar, after whom The Frances Burney Collection of Newspapers is named.

Esther Sleepe Frances Burney bore two other boys, both named Charles, who died in infancy in 1752 and 1754.

Frances Burney began composing small letters and stories almost as soon as she learnt the alphabet.

Frances Burney often joined with her brothers and sisters in writing and acting in plays.

Esther Burney died in 1762 when Frances was ten years old.

In 1767, Charles Frances Burney eloped to marry for a second time, to Elizabeth Allen, the wealthy widow of a King's Lynn wine merchant.

The Frances Burney children found their new stepmother overbearing and quick to anger, and they took refuge by making fun of her behind her back.

At the age of eight, Frances Burney had yet to learn the alphabet; some scholars suggest she had a form of dyslexia.

Esther and Susanna were sent by their father to be educated in Paris, while at home Frances Burney educated herself by reading from the family collection, including Plutarch's Lives, works by Shakespeare, histories, sermons, poetry, plays, novels and courtesy books.

Frances Burney drew on this material, along with her journals, when writing her first novels.

Scholars who have looked into the extent of Frances Burney's reading and self-education find a child who was unusually precocious and ambitious, working hard to overcome an early disability.

Frances Burney encouraged Burney's writing by soliciting frequent journal-letters from her that recounted to him the goings-on in her family and social circle in London.

Frances Burney paid her first formal visit to Crisp at Chessington Hall in Surrey in 1766.

Dr Frances Burney had first made Crisp's acquaintance in about 1745 at the house of Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville.

Frances Burney eventually recouped some of the effort by using it as a foundation for her first novel, Evelina, which follows the life of the fictional Caroline Evelyn's daughter.

Frances Burney's father read public reviews of it before learning that the author was his daughter.

Frances Burney certainly saw social advantages in having a successful writer in the family.

In choosing to narrate the novel through letters written by the protagonist, Frances Burney made use of her own writing experience.

Frances Burney is seen as a "shrewd observer of her times and a clever recorder of its charms and its follies".

Furthermore, she sought to put to use the epistolary form espoused periodically by Frances Burney, as seen in Lady Susan and to a lesser extent Pride and Prejudice.

Sojourns at Streatham occupied months at a time, and on several occasions the guests, including Frances Burney, made trips to Brighton and to Bath.

In 1779, encouraged by the public's warm reception of comic material in Evelina, and with offers of help from Arthur Murphy and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Frances Burney began to write a dramatic comedy called The Witlings.

Frances Burney's plays came to light again in 1945 when her papers were acquired by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

In 1775 Frances Burney turned down a marriage proposal from one Thomas Barlow, a man whom she had met only once.

Frances Burney hesitated, not wishing to be separated from her family, and especially resistant to employment that would restrict free use of her time in writing.

Frances Burney recorded the speeches of Edmund Burke at the trial.

Frances Burney was courted by an official of the royal household, Colonel Stephen Digby, but he eventually married another woman of greater wealth.

Frances Burney kept up a friendship with the royal family and received letters from the princesses from 1818 until 1840.

The French Revolution began in 1789; Frances Burney was among many literary figures in England who sympathized with its early ideals of equality and social justice.

Frances Burney quickly became close to General Alexandre d'Arblay, an artillery officer who had been adjutant-general to Lafayette, a hero of the French Revolution whose political views lay between those of Royalist and of Republicans.

Frances Burney's father disapproved of d'Arblay's poverty, Catholicism, and ambiguous social status as an emigre.

Frances Burney later described the operation in detail, since she was conscious through most of it, as it took place before the development of anaesthetics.

Frances Burney sent her account of this experience months later to her sister Esther without rereading it.

Frances Burney survived, and returned to England with her son in 1812 to visit her ailing father and to avoid young Alexander's conscription into the French army.

Charles Frances Burney died in 1814, and she went back to France later that year after the Treaty of Paris had been concluded, to be with her husband.

Frances Burney published her fourth novel, The Wanderer: Or, Female Difficulties, a few days before her father's death.

Frances Burney outlived her son, who died in 1837, and her sister Charlotte Broome, who died in 1838.

Frances Burney continued to write often to members of her family.

Frances Burney was buried with her son and her husband in Walcot cemetery in Bath.