FRANCES BURNEY (1752–1840), the daughter of musicologist Dr Charles Burney, spent her youth in the midst of the London society which included Dr Johnson, Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, the Bluestocking Circle and many members of the aristocracy. When she published her first novel, Evelina, anonymously in 1778, the revelation of its authorship brought her immediate fame. Her later novels are Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814). She also wrote four comic dramas and four tragedies. None of these was published and only one was produced during her lifetime. From 1786 to 1791 she endured an unhappy existence at Court as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte. In 1793 she married Alexandre d’Arblay, an aristocratic but penniless French refugee in England; their only child, Alexander, was born in 1795. She and her husband were interned by Napoleon and lived in France from 1802 to 1812. She was also in France 1814–15, recording in her journals the final stages of the Napoleonic wars. Widowed in 1818, she lived in London for the remainder of her life, publishing the Memoirs of Doctor Burney in 1832. Burney’s journals and letters, written over a seventy-year period from 1768 to 1839, are distinguished by their remarkable range and variety, and by her ability to bring the world around her to life.
PETER SABOR is Professor of English at Laval University, Quebec. His other edition for Penguin Classics is Richardson’s Pamela. He has also edited Burney’s Cecilia (with Margaret Anne Doody), The Wanderer (with Doody and Robert Mack) and her Complete Plays (with Stewart Cooke and Geoffrey Sill), as well as Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (with Kerry McSweeney), Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and Sarah Fielding’s David Simple. He has published two books on Horace Walpole, Horace Walpole: A Reference Guide and Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage.
LARS E. TROIDE is Professor of English and Director of the Burney Papers Project at McGill University, Montreal. He was formerly a Research Associate on the Horace Walpole Project at Yale University, where he co-edited Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Henry Seymour Conway. He is also editor of Horace Walpole’s Miscellany and The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. He has twice been a Research Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC.
FRANCES BURNEY
Journals and Letters
Selected with an introduction by
PETER SABOR and LARS E. TROIDE
with the assistance of STEWART COOKE
and VICTORIA KORTES-PAPP
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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
For permission to publish the manuscripts in their custody we are indebted to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, Curator Rodney Phillips; the Manuscripts Department, British Library (Barrett Collection of Burney Papers, Egerton 3690–3708); the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Yale University Library, Curator Stephen Parks; the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, Chairman Claude Rawson; and the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MA 35. For manuscripts in private collections we are grateful to John R. G. Comyn and Michael Burney-Cumming.
The Bogle miniature of Frances Burney on the cover is used by courtesy of Paula F. Peyraud. The illustration of the first page of Burney’s journals is by permission of the Berg Collection.
We have profited from the editorial expertise, at Penguin Books, of Tim Bates, Robert Mighall and Lindeth Vasey. For help with specific problems we are indebted to Hester Davenport, Margaret Anne Doody, Isobel Grundy, Eva Kortes-Papp, Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ, and Lisa Saroli. We also thank Rodney Clark, Oscar Grossman, Marie Legroulx, Emmi Sabor, and Maia, Nathan and Teresa Troide for their love and constant support.
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