Frances (or ‘Fanny’ to her family and closest friends) was impelled to this species of self-immolation by a powerful sense of guilt. Contemporary society frowned upon any female who ‘wasted’ her time writing anything other than familiar letters or household memoranda. Private letters were regarded as an extension of conversation and therefore tolerated as practical or one of the social graces. Household notes helped women in their ideal capacity as homemakers. Any other form of composition – especially novels, which were morally suspect – consumed hours that were better spent on useful household chores, such as needlework, or in reading morally improving works, such as sermons, or in learning French or music, decorative accomplishments allowed to the female sex.

Burney’s nod to feminine literary propriety lasted only nine months. In March 1768 she began a private journal, giving her reason in the opening sentence: ‘To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions, when the Hour arrives at which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a Journal: a Journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole Heart!’ (selection 1). It is the confessional nature of her journal that was paramount; the need to commit to paper her innermost thoughts overrode the fear of accidental discovery, which was realized one evening when her father, the music historian Dr Charles Burney, picked up a page which she had absentmindedly left on the piano (selection 5). Luckily for her it contained nothing that was objectionable, and Dr Burney, a liberal man by the standards of the day, gave her his tacit approval to continue the journal, provided she be more careful in the future.

Frances Burney would continue her private journal for the next ten years, to be replaced increasingly by journal letters to Susanna. Outside her immediate family her most important epistolary confidant would be Samuel Crisp, a friend of her father who lived in retirement at Chessington, Surrey, and who became a second ‘Daddy’ to the Burney children. After Crisp’s death in 1783 and Susanna’s in 1800, she would reveal herself most in letters to other members of her family, including her brother Charles and sister Esther, and various nephews and nieces, most notably her niece Charlotte Barrett, whom she made her literary executrix.

Besides voluminous journals and letters, Burney’s compulsion to write would result in four novels and eight plays over the course of her long life. But her literary talent had not always been apparent. She was born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, on 13 June 1752, the third child and second daughter of Charles Burney, a rising musician who had been forced to flee the coal smoke of London because of a lung ailment. When the Burney family returned to London in 1760, the eight-year-old Frances had not yet learned her letters, and was even thought somewhat ‘slow’. By the age of ten, however, she had not only learned to read but had already begun writing, and the following year she produced her earliest surviving composition, a brief ‘Ode to Content’, remarkable for its precocity.2

In 1762 Burney’s mother died, a loss which devastated the sensitive young girl. Her father also felt the loss keenly, but five years later he remarried. His second wife was Elizabeth Allen, widow of a wealthy King’s Lynn grain merchant. This union swelled the Burney household, adding Elizabeth’s three children to Charles Burney’s six, and the couple would have two more children.

In 1769 Charles Burney was awarded a doctorate in music by Oxford University. During the years that followed Frances served as her father’s amanuensis for a monumental General History of Music, which would establish his reputation as the foremost music historian in England. She also found the time secretly to write a sequel to the destroyed ‘History of Caroline Evelyn’, about Caroline Evelyn’s daughter. Evelina; or, a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, was published anonymously in January 1778. The novel took the London literary world by storm. Revealed as its author, the hypersensitive and extremely shy young writer found herself the focus of intense interest and curiosity. She became a frequent guest at the Streatham

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seat of Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer and Member of Parliament, and his wife Hester Lynch Thrale. The most famous member of the Thrales’ circle was Samuel Johnson, who took a strong avuncular liking to Fanny.

Encouraged by Johnson, Hester Thrale, Joshua Reynolds, the dramatists Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Arthur Murphy, and others, Frances undertook the writing of a comedy, The Witlings. She was forced to suppress it at the urging of her father and Crisp, who feared that the subject would offend prominent bluestockings, in particular Elizabeth Montagu. In 1782 Frances published a second novel, Cecilia, also a great success. In 1783 she was introduced to Mary Delany, a revered friend of King George III and Queen Charlotte, who would be instrumental in procuring Burney’s appointment to the Court as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, a position she took up in July 1786.

The removal from her family and friends, the suffocating etiquette and the bad-tempered tyranny of her immediate superior, Elizabeth Schwellenberg, made Burney’s years at Court extremely unhappy ones. During the period of the King’s ‘madness’, October 1788 to March 1789, she began writing a tragedy, Edwy and Elgiva. In 1791 she received the Queen’s permission to retire from her position for reasons of ill health.

Freed from the Court with a pension of £100 a year (half her Court salary), Burney went on a tour of western England with her friend, Anna Ord, and then settled with her father at his lodgings in Chelsea College. In 1793 she met Alexandre d’Arblay – a French officer who had fled Revolutionary France – while on a visit to William and Frederica Locke, neighbours in Surrey and friends of Susanna and her husband Molesworth Phillips.