Fanny Burney

Frances Burney, an English satirical author, playwright, and diarist (13 June 1752 - 6 January 1840), was also known by the names Fanny Burney and, subsequently, Madame d'Arblay. She served as George III's queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz's "Keeper of the Robes" from 1786 to 1790. At the age of 41, she wed General Alexandre d'Arblay, a French exile, in 1793. Following a lengthy writing career and travels during the war that left her stranded in France for more than ten years, she made...See more

Frances Burney, an English satirical author, playwright, and diarist (13 June 1752 - 6 January 1840), was also known by the names Fanny Burney and, subsequently, Madame d'Arblay. She served as George III's queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz's "Keeper of the Robes" from 1786 to 1790. At the age of 41, she wed General Alexandre d'Arblay, a French exile, in 1793. Following a lengthy writing career and travels during the war that left her stranded in France for more than ten years, she made her home in Bath, England, where she passed away on January 6, 1840. Evelina (1778), the first of her four books, was the most popular and is still her best-known work. Cecilia (1782) came next. During her life, the majority of her theater plays were never performed. Forty-nine years after her death in 1889, she produced a memoir of her father (1832) and several letters and journals, which have been published piecemeal since then. Frances Burney wrote plays, diaries, and novels. She authored a total of twenty-five volumes of journals and letters, eight plays, four novels, and one biography. She has earned recognition from critics as a stand-alone author, but she also predicted satirical novelists of manners like Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. See less