Frances (Fanny) Burney

Frances (Fanny) Burney was born in 1752 in King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Her father was Dr. Charles Burney, a musician and writer. When she was just eight years old, she moved to London with her family. Following in her father’s footsteps, she began to write at an early age. But it wasn’t until 1778 that she was propelled into the limelight by the anonymous publication of her novel, Evelina. Painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was a family friend, had reportedly ‘been fed while reading the little work,’ Having refused to ‘quit it at table’, another family friend, statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, ‘had sat up a whole night to finish it’.

Fanny had many distinguished fans of her work, including writer Samuel Johnson and actor and playwright David Garrick. Fanny did not stop at one novel; she sealed her literary reputation with Cecilia (1782), and while working as the Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, she wrote her most profitable novel, Camilla (1796).

A young Jane Austen was among those who looked up to Fanny. It is said she read the novel Cecilia many times, paying particular attention to its closing pages, in which the phrase ‘PRIDE AND PREJUDICE’ is repeated three times in capitals. Burney influenced not only Austen but other novelists of the time, so much so that Virginia Woolf described her as the mother of English fiction.

Source:

www.english-heritage.org.uk