Frances Burney

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Frances Burney (1752 – 6 January 1840), also known as Fanny Burney and after her marriage as Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist, and playwright.

Esther Sleepe Burney (1725–1762) was born in Lynn Regis, now King's Lynn, England, on June 1352, to the musician and music historian Dr. Charles Burney (1726–1814) and his first wife, Esther Sleepe Burney (1725–1762).

She was self-educated and began writing "scribblings" at the age of ten, the third of her mother's six children.

Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen, was an unusual appointment as a courtier from 1786 to 1790, becoming "Keeper of the Robes" to her.

During 1793, she married General Alexandre D'Arblay, a French immigrant.

Alexander, the family's sole son, was born in 1794.

She ended in Bath, England, where she died on January 6, 1840, after a long writing career and travels, during which she was left homeless in France by war for more than ten years. Burney wrote four books, of which Evelina (1778), was the most profitable and remains the most admired.

She has written several plays, most of which were never performed in public settings, a biography of her father (1832), and left slews of letters and journals that have been slowly published since 1889.

Family life

Francess was born in Lynn Regis, now King's Lynn, England, on June 1352, to Dr. Charles Burney (1726–1814) and Esther Sleepe Burney (1725–1762) as the third of her mother's six children. Esther (1749-1832) and James (1750–1821) were her elder siblings; those younger were Susanna Elizabeth (1755–1817) and Charlotte Ann (1761–1838). On her second and third voyages, James Cook became an admiral and sailed with Captain James Cook as an admiral. Charles Burney, a younger scholar, was identified as a scholar of the Burney Collection of Newspapers.

Susanna's younger sister, Molesworth Phillips, an officer in Captain Cook's last voyage, died in 1781; she left a journal that gives a first hand-witness account of the Gordon Riots. Sarah Harriet Burney (1772–1844), her younger half-sister, became a novelist, releasing seven works of fiction. Esther Sleepe Burney had two other children, both named Charles, who died in infancy in 1752 and 1754.

Frances Burney began writing small letters and stories as soon as she learned the alphabet. She has often collaborated with her brothers and sisters in writing and acting in plays. Many of the Burney families had many close friends. "Daddy Crisp" was almost like a second father to Frances and a strong influence on her early writing years. Margaret Anne Doody, a Burney scholar, has investigated abuses inside Burney's family that influenced Burney's writing and personal lives. In 1798–1803, she said one strain was an incestuous brother James of Burney and their half-sister Sarah, but there is no concrete evidence to support Sarah in later life.

Esther Sleepe, Frances Burney's mother, was described by historians as a woman of "warmth and intelligence" who had been brought up a Catholic. This French ancestor inspired Frances Burney's self-confidence in later life, possibly contributing to her attraction and subsequent marriage to Alexandre d'Arblay. Esther Burney died in 1762 when Frances was ten years old.

Charles Burney, France's father, was known for his personal charm and perhaps more for his work as a singer, a composer, a man of letters. He moved his family from London in 1760, a move that increased their exposure to the cultural aspects of English life and also their social standing. They lived in Soho's vibrant cultural circle, with Charles as a rounder.

Charles Burney eloped to Elizabeth Allen, the wealthy widow of a King's Lynn wine merchant, for a second time in 1767. Allen had three children of her own, and several years after the marriage, the two families merged into one. This recent domestic crisis brought a lot of anxiety. The Burney children's new stepmother was overbearing and quick to anger, and they took refuge in laughing at her back. However, their collective misery helped them to become closer to one another in some respects. The family moved again in 1774 to St Martin's Street, Westminster, where it had been the home of Isaac Newton.

Education

Esther and Susanna, France's sisters, were favoured over Frances by their father for their superior attractiveness and intelligence, according to Esther and Susanna. Frances had yet to learn the alphabet at the age of eight, and some scholars believe she had a form of dyslexia. She had written for her own amusement by the age of ten, but not before that. Esther and Susanna were sent by their father to be trained in Paris, but Frances educated herself by reading from Plutarch's Lives, histories, sermons, poetry, novels, and courtesy books. When writing her first books, she drew on this information, as well as her journals. Scholars who have looked into the depth of Burney's reading and self-education find a child who was both precocious and enthusiastic, and they were struggling to get through a teenage boy with a disability from an early age.

Fanny spent her fifteen years in the midst of a fantastic social circle, assembled round her father on Polish Street, and later in St Martin's Street. Garrick was a regular visitor and would arrive before eight o'clock in the morning. She leaves a graphic account of several "lyons" they entertained, particularly Omai, the young man from Raiatea, and Alexis Orlov, a favorite of Catherine the Great. Dr Johnson was first seen at her father's house in March 1777.

Samuel Crisp, a "cultivated littérateur" in France's literary education, was a critical component of her mother's literary education. Burney boosted Burney's writing by soliciting regular journal-letters from her that detailed the happenings in her family and social circle in London. In 1766, Frances paid her first official visit to Crisp at Chessington Hall in Surrey. Dr. Burney had first met Crisp in about 1745 at the home of Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville. Crisp's play Virginia, which was staged by David Garrick in 1754 at the request of the Countess of Coventry (née Maria Gunning), had been unsuccessful, and Crisp had moved to Chessington Hall, where he frequently entertained Dr Burney and his family.

Life in France: a revolution and mastectomy.

In 1801, d'Arblay was granted employment with the government of Napoleon Bonaparte in France, and Burney and her son followed him to Paris, where they were expected to remain for a year. The outbreak of war between France and England delayed their visit, and the two countries remained exile for ten years. Burney, who was in France, was sympathetic to her husband's decision to move to Passy, outside of Paris.

Burney began pains in her breast in August 1810, which her husband suspected might be due to breast cancer. She was eventually ruled by many top physicians, and Dr. Aumont, Dr. Larbey, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Aumont, Dr. Ribey, M. Dubois, was among many leading physicians who underwent mastectomy by "7 men in black," according to a year later, as a student of Dr. Larbois. The operation was carried out like a battlefield mission under M. Dubois' command, but Empress Marie Louise was named as France's top physician. Burney later detailed the procedure in detail, since she was aware of the bulk of it long before the advent of anaesthetics.

She told her sister Esther that she had this experience months later without rereading it. It is one of the most recent accounts of a mastectomy. It's difficult to decide whether the breast biopsy was or not cancerous today. She survived and returned to England with her son in 1812 to visit her dying father and to prevent young Alexander's conscription into the French army. Charles Burney died in 1814, and she returned to France later this year to be with her husband.

Napoleon escaped from Elba and returned to France in 1815. D'Arblay, a student at King Louis XVIII, stayed faithful to King Louis XVIII and was instrumental in the military actions that followed. Burney migrated to Belgium. When her husband was injured, she joined him at Trèves (Trier) and together they returned to Bath, England, where they lived at 23 Great Stanhope Street. In her Waterloo Journal of 1818–1832, Burney wrote an account of this trip and of her Paris years. In 1818, D'Arblay was promoted to lieutenant-general, but he died shortly after of cancer.

Later life

Burney lived out of her father, who died in 1837, and her sister Charlotte Broome, who died in 1838. Burney spent time in Bath with younger Burney family members who found her an engaging storyteller with a gift for imitating the personalities she referred to. She continued to write often to relatives of her family.

Burney, a French ancestor, died on January 6, 1840. In Bath's Walcot cemetery, she was buried with her son and husband. A gravestone was later discovered in St Swithin's churchyard, across the road from Jane Austen's father, George Austen.

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Overview of career

Frances Burney was a novelist, diarist and playwright. In all, she wrote four novels, eight plays, one biography and twenty-five volumes of journals and letters. She 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.

She published her first novel, Evelina, anonymously in 1778. Burney feared that her father would find what she called her "scribblings". When she published Evelina anonymously, she only told her siblings and two trusted aunts. Her closest sister, Susanna, helped with the cover-up. Eventually her father read the novel and guessed that Burney was its author. News of her identity spread. The novel brought Burney almost immediate fame with its unique narrative and comic strengths. She followed it with Cecilia in 1782, Camilla in 1796 and The Wanderer in 1814.

All 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. With one exception, Burney never succeeded in having her plays performed, largely due to objections from her father, who thought that publicity from such an effort would be damaging to her reputation. The exception was Edwy and Elgiva, which unfortunately was not well received by the public and closed after the first night's performance despite having Sarah Siddons in the cast.

Although her novels were hugely popular during her lifetime, Burney's reputation as a writer of fiction suffered after her death at the hands of biographers and critics, who felt that the extensive diaries, published posthumously in 1842–1846, offer a more interesting and accurate portrait of 18th-century life. Today critics are returning to her novels and plays with renewed interest in her outlook on the social lives and struggles of women in a predominantly male-oriented culture. Scholars continue to value Burney's diaries as well, for their candid depictions of English society.

Through her whole writing career, Burney's talent for satirical caricature was widely acknowledged: figures such as Dr Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Hester Lynch Thrale and David Garrick were among her admirers. Her early novels were read and enjoyed by Jane Austen, whose own title Pride and Prejudice derives from the final pages of Cecilia. Thackeray is said to have drawn on the first-person account of the Battle of Waterloo recorded in her diaries while writing his Vanity Fair.

Burney's early career was strongly affected by her relations with her father and the critical attentions of a family friend, Samuel Crisp. Both encouraged her writing, but used their influence to dissuade her from publishing or performing her dramatic comedies, as they saw the genre as inappropriate for a lady. Many feminist critics see her as an author whose natural talent for satire was stifled by the social pressures on female authors. Burney persisted despite the setbacks. When her comedies were poorly received, she returned to novel writing, and later tried her hand at tragedy. She supported both herself and her family on the proceeds of her later novels, Camilla and The Wanderer.

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