Frances Burney

Frances Burney published Evelina anonymously at twenty-five, was afraid her father would be angry, and became the novelist Jane Austen learned from. She was the daughter of the music historian Charles Burney and grew up in a house visited by Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick; she was thought slow as a child and could not read at eight, then taught herself and began keeping the journals she continued for seventy-two years. She burned her early manuscripts on her fifteenth birthday under family pressure. Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World appeared in 1778 without her name on it, was praised by Johnson and Burke, and her authorship became known within months. Cecilia followed in 1782, and the phrase pride and prejudice occurs in its closing pages. She spent five unhappy years from 1786 as Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, a post she could not refuse and was released from only on grounds of health. In 1793 she married Alexandre d'Arblay, a penniless French emigre general, against her father's wishes, and lived in France for ten years, trapped there by the resumption of war. In 1811 she underwent a mastectomy without anaesthetic and wrote an account of it to her sister that is one of the earliest patient narratives of surgery in English. She outlived her husband and her son. Austen was a subscriber to her novel Camilla. She was present at the trial of Warren Hastings and left a detailed account of it. Her journals and letters run to more than a dozen printed volumes and are read as a source on the court, the Johnson circle and the Napoleonic wars alike. She witnessed the aftermath of Waterloo from Brussels. She wrote four novels, eight plays and a life of her father.

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