Frances Burney

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Standard Name: Burney, Frances
Birth Name: Frances Burney
Nickname: Fanny
Nickname: The Old Lady
Married Name: Frances D'Arblay
Indexed Name: Madame D'Arblay
Pseudonym: A Sister of the Order
Used Form: the author of Evelina
Used Form: the author of Evelina and Cecilia
Used Form: the author of Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla
FB , renowned as a novelist in her youth and middle age, outlived her high reputation; her fourth and last novel (published in 1814) was her least well received. Her diaries and letters, posthumously published, were greeted with renewed acclaim. During the late twentieth century the re-awakening of interest in her fiction and the rediscovery of her plays revealed her as a woman of letters to be reckoned with. Today her reputation in the academic world stands high, and productions of her plays are no longer isolated events.
Photo of the painting of Frances Burney by her cousin Edward Francisco Burney, c. 1784-5. She is turned to the viewer's left with lowered gaze, wearing a long-sleeved pale pink gown with a pink bow and a dark shawl; but the portrait is dominated by her huge hat with puffed-up crown and bow of broad ribbon. National Portrait Gallery

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Elizabeth Meeke
Her relations were horrified and repelled at her new role as a unchaste woman. Frances Burney felt an uncontrollable repugnance when convention required that they should kiss.
Macdonald, Simon. “Identifying Mrs Meeke: Another Burney Family Novelist”. Review of English Studies, Oxford University Press.
Her sister Maria found her penitence insincere, her...
Dedications Eliza Parsons
EP dedicated her gothic novel Anecdotes of Two Well-Known Families to the First Female Pen in England (possibly Frances Burney ), and claimed that the book was Written by a Descendant.
Karen Morton points...
Education Anne Marsh
She was not taught religion until she was five, and if her mother had not thought her a forward child she would have waited another year. It was a maxim of my Mother that children...
Education Mary Martha Sherwood
From a very early age, MMS remembered my mother teaching me to read with my brother, in a book where [there] was a picture of a white horse feeding by star-light.
Sherwood, Mary Martha, and Henry Sherwood. The Life of Mrs. Sherwood. Kelly, SophiaEditor , Darton, 1854.
23
From the age...
Family and Intimate relationships Selina Bunbury
SB greatly admired Frances Burney , who was a family connection by marriage—an unfortunate connection, in fact, since Molesworth Phillips , who married Frances's closest sister, Susan , and proved a cruel husband, was SB
Family and Intimate relationships Hester Lynch Piozzi
Gabriel Piozzi came into Hester Thrale's life as music teacher of her eldest daughter. Two days before Henry Thrale's death a friend told her warningly, that Man is in Love with you.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press, 1987.
198
Probably by...
Family and Intimate relationships Lady Caroline Lamb
She apparently recruited her devils from the ranks of the theatre companies; the Morning Chronicle complained that there were too many of them.
Douglass, Paul. Lady Caroline Lamb. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
224
She may have been thinking of another referent besides Byron: the...
Family and Intimate relationships Sarah Harriet Burney
Her famous half-sister, the writer Frances Burney , was almost a generation her senior.
Family and Intimate relationships Violet Hunt
Violet's aunt, Margaret 's elder sister, Annie Raine Ellis , was the first to edit and publish, in 1889, Frances (Fanny) Burney 's Early Journals.
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster, 1990.
20
She also wrote introductions and annotations for two of Burney's novels.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online.
Family and Intimate relationships Sophia Lee
Among strikingly various estimates of his acting ability, Frances Burney was his firm admirer.
Lee, Sophia. “Introduction”. The Recess, edited by April Alliston, University Press of Kentucky, 2000, p. ix - lii.
xxiv
Family and Intimate relationships Jan Struther
In autumn 1939, within a month of publishing the book that was to make her famous, JS first met Adolf Placzek , or Dolf, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, thirteen years her junior (son...
Family and Intimate relationships Lady Louisa Stuart
It gave LLS some trouble as a child that her grandmother was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu : I am sure I heartily hated her name. Whatever I wanted to learn, everybody was up in arms...
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Meeke
This marriage gave little Elizabeth Allen four stepsisters: Esther , Frances , Susan , and Charlotte Ann Burney . She later acquired a half-sister, Sarah Harriet Burney .
Family and Intimate relationships Cassandra Cooke
Cassandra's cousin Jane Austen criticised the household management of Samuel Cooke (who was her godfather), judging him a disagreable, fidgetty master to his servants.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
In his professional capacity he worried about competing with the Methodists
Friends, Associates Margaret Bingham, Countess Lucan
She was a well-known figure in London cultural circles, particularly that of the Bluestockings. Charles Burney called her at-home evenings blue conversazioni's and Horace Walpole called them quite Mazarine-blue. Others specifically mentioned in...

Timeline

1756 or 1757
Frances Greville , in Italy with her family some months after the death of her eldest son (aged around six), composed a poem which became a landmark text, the Ode to [or Prayer for] Indifference.
1780
James Harrison (hitherto chiefly known as a music publisher) began to issue the handsomely-produced Novelists' Magazine, a weekly serial reprinting of canonical novels.
1782
George Romney painted a picture to illustrate (after the fact) William Hayley 'a Triumphs of Temper, 1781: Serena, reading Burney 's Evelina. The model was Honora Sneyd .
1784
Henry Fearon , surgeon, published A Treatise on Cancers, with a New and Successful Method of Operating, Particularly in Cancers of the Breast and Testis.
By 22 July 1797
William Beckford published a second and more marked burlesque attack on women's writing: Azemia: A Descriptive and Sentimental Novel. Interspersed with Pieces of Poetry.
1798
Richard Polwhele published The Unsex'd Females, his notorious attack on Wollstonecraft and other active radicals.
27 March 1802
The Peace of Amiens ended the war which had raged between England and France for nine years.
August 1813
The Critical Review published its first welcome to Eaton Stannard Barrett 's famous parody of sentimental novels, The Heroine, or Adventures of the Fair Romance Reader.
Early 1818
William Hazlitt opened On the Living Poets, the last of his Lectures on the English Poets, with a statement on gender issues.
9 December 1826
The Literary Gazette printed a Key to Marianne Spencer Hudson 's silver-fork novel, Almack's (titled after the well-known elite gentlemen's club of the same name), which had already reached its second edition this year. The...
1835
Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville were awarded honorary memberships by the Royal Astronomical Society .
17 June 1843
Julia Charlotte Maitland published, as a Lady, her Letters fromMadras: during the years 1836-1839.
1864
Famous Girls who have become Illustrious Women: Forming Models for Imitation by the Young Women of England, a very popular book of biographical sketches by John M. Darton , was published.
1866
The Royal Society of Arts established a scheme (believed to be the first in the world) for setting up commemorative plaques on buildings associated with famous people.
Quinn, Ben. “Plaque blues. Cuts hit heritage scheme”. Guardian Weekly, p. 16.
1872
US writer Susan Coolidge (Sarah Chauncy, or Chauncey, Woolsey) published her highly popular and influential story for girls entitled What Katy Did.
American National Biography.