Fanny Burney

Novelist and playwright Frances (Fanny) Burney, 1752-1840, was also a prolific writer of journals and letters, beginning with the diary she started at fifteen and continuing until the end of her eventful life. From her youth in London high society to a period in the court of Queen Charlotte and her years interned in France with her husband Alexandre d'Arblay during the Napoleonic Wars, she captured the changing times around her, creating brilliantly comic and candid portraits of those she encountered - including the 'mad' King George, Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick and a charismatic Napoleon Bonaparte. She also describes, in her most moving piece, undergoing a mastectomy at fifty-nine without anaesthetic. Whether a carefree young girl or a mature woman, Fanny Burney's forthright, intimate and wickedly perceptive voice brings her world powerfully to life.

‘Dazzling...full of special delights. Harman excels in the vivid presentation of scenes, the selection of detail...[a] marvellous and beautifully written book.’ Elspeth Barker, Independent on Sunday

As the author of "Evelina" and "Cecilia", both of which created new dimensions for the novel, Fanny Burney is as well remembered for her memoirs of Johnson, her mastectomy and her account of the Battle of Waterloo. This portrait of Burney paints a picture of this forward-looking woman.

Volume IV of The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, covering the years 1780-1781, will be of particular interest to students of Burney as it marks the young author's introduction into the world following the astonishing success of her novel Evelina (1778) and includes her visits to Streatham and her encounters with Hester and Henry Thrale and Dr Johnson. It was an exciting period in her life, which she managed to enjoy despite struggling to repeat her first success while avoiding the often unwelcome attention it brought. But it was also a difficult period in her family life as she dealt with jealous interference by her stepmother, the courtship of her sister Susan by a man she considered untrustworthy, and the misbehaviour of her brothers. Burney's enthusiasm makes the most of her experiences and she describes characters and scenes with all the genius displayed in her novels. Her descriptions contain the four great attributes that distinguish her novels: brilliant handling of detail, total and full recall of conversations characteristic of the speaker, sensibility and empathy for others, and great relish for the ridiculous wherever it occurred.

Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is best known as the author of EVELINA, one of the most engaging novels of the eighteenth century. But for much of her long life, she was also an incomparable diarist, witnessing both the madness of George III and the young Queen Victoria's coronation. To read the journals she kept from the age of sixteen is to step back into Georgian England, meeting Dr Johnson, Garrick and Reynolds, being chased round the gardens of Kew Palace by the King. . . She was lady-in-writing to Queen Charlotte; she married an aristocratic emigre from the French Revolution and had her first and only child when she was forty-two; she was in Paris as Napoleon's armies marshalled against England, and in Brussels she heard the muffled guns, and watched the wounded being carried back from Waterloo. Kate Chisholm's delightful biography, incorporating the latest research and illustrate with unusual portraits and drawings, is lively, funny, shocking, informative and deeply moving; it paints a vivid portrait of a woman of great talent, against the changing background of England and France, a culture and an age.

This carefully crafted ebook collection is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: "Evelina" is the unacknowledged, but legitimate daughter of a dissipated English aristocrat, thus raised in rural seclusion until her 17th year. Through a series of humorous events that take place in London and the resort town of Hotwells, near Bristol, Evelina learns to navigate the complex layers of 18th-century society and earn the love of a distinguished nobleman. "Cecilia" is the tale about the trials and tribulations of a young upper class woman who must negotiate London society for the first time and who falls in love with a social superior. "Camilla" deals with the matrimonial concerns of a group of young people: Camilla Tyrold, her sisters Lavinia and Eugenia, and their cousin, the beautiful Indiana Lynmere. Focal is the love affair between Camilla herself and her eligible suitor, Edgar Mandlebert. They have many hardships, however, caused by misunderstandings and mistakes, in the path of true love. "The Wanderer" is the historical tale with Gothic overtones set during the 1790s about a mysterious woman who attempts to support herself while hiding her identity. The novel focuses on the difficulties faced by women as they strive for economic and social independence. Frances Burney (1752-1840) was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. She is best known for her novels Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer. Burney's novels explore the lives of English aristocrats, and satirize their social pretensions and personal foibles, with an eye to larger questions such as the politics of female identity. She has gained critical respect in her own right, but she also foreshadowed such novelists of manners with a satirical bent as Jane Austen and Thackeray.