Fanny Burney - Claire Harman

On 13 June 1767, her 15th birthday, Fanny Burney made a bonfire of all her works, "with the sincere intention to extinguish for ever in their ashes her scribbling propensity". Fanny was genuinely worried that she might turn into an author, a fate incompatible - for a woman - with respectability.;Her hope was in vain. Not only was she to write four novels ("Evelina", "Cecilia", "Camilla" and "The Wanderer"), but she also kept a voluminous diary for the next 70 years and was a prolific letter-writer. Daughter of the eminent music historian Dr Charles Burney; editor of his infamous Memoirs; friend of Sheridan, Garrick, Burke, Boswell and Johnson; second keeper of the robes to George III's Queen Charlotte; wife to a refugee French aristocrat; detained for ten years in revolutionary France; victim of a mastectomy without anaesthetic. Fanny Burney's life was as eventful as any novel.;This text is the biography of Fanny Burney, one of the the first truly literary woman novelists in English, who exercised a profound influence on Jane Austen and whose own life, spanning the years 1752 to 1840, embraced the worlds of music, literature, politics, English Court life and the French Revolution.