They married, after a six-month courtship, in July 1793, having gained the reluctant consent of Dr Burney, and in December 1794 their only child, Alexander, was born. The marriage was, by all accounts, an exceptionally happy one, and Alexandre proved to be a devoted husband, despite disagreements between the couple over the upbringing of their son.

When liberated from Court service, Burney could return more fully to literary activities. In 1793 she published a pamphlet, Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy, written on behalf of the Catholic clergy who had fled to England from Revolutionary France. In March 1795, her first tragedy, Edwy and Elgiva, with a prologue by her brother Charles, was performed at the Drury Lane Theatre, but withdrawn after a single, spectacularly unsuccessful performance. And in 1796 Burney published by subscription a third novel, Camilla. With the proceeds from this book her husband designed and built ‘Camilla Cottage’ on a piece of property given them by the Lockes. In 1802 Burney and her son followed d’Arblay to France, where the renewal of hostilities with England forced them all to remain for ten years. During her years in France Burney worked steadily on a novel, The Wanderer.

Back in England she published this novel, which was to be her last, in 1814. In 1815 her husband was wounded fighting in the army opposing Napoleon. Later that year they took lodgings in Bath, where d’Arblay died in 1818. Four months later Burney moved to London. She spent a good part of the next twenty years going over the family papers, her own and those of her father, which she had inherited upon his death in 1814. In 1832 she published her final work, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, and in 1840 she died, aged eighty-seven, on 6 January, exactly forty years to the day after the death of her beloved Susanna. She was buried in Wolcot Churchyard, Bath, beside her husband and her son (who had predeceased her by three years).

Famous in her lifetime as a novelist, Burney also became celebrated as a diarist with the posthumous publication of a seven-volume selection of The Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay (1842–6), edited by Charlotte Barrett. These were later supplemented by the two-volume Early Diary of Frances Burney (1889), edited by Annie Raine Ellis. These editions have been supplanted by the modern complete editions of Joyce Hemlow and Lars E. Troide, which will eventually total twenty-four volumes (see Further Reading). For this Penguin Classics edition the volume editors have gone back to the original manuscripts, mostly in the Barrett Collection of the British Library and the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. We have aimed to select representative passages which reflect the great range and variety of Burney’s journals and letters, giving the reader a sense both of Burney – her life and thought – and of the world – the events and personalities – that she presents to us.

Burney’s earliest journals and letters are very much those of a precocious young girl – humorous, playful, self-centred and irreverent. She dreams about falling in love, chafes at social customs which require visits to people one doesn’t like and lampoons the marriage of two family servants. When her beloved father receives his doctorate from Oxford University, she sends him a comic verse letter comparing him to a fictional shoemaker who receives a physician’s licence.

Her exuberance in her letters and with her family and friends is balanced by the gravity she assumes in the presence of strangers. A friend of her sister Esther dubs her ‘the silent observant Miss Fanny’,3 and observant she is, filling her journals with memorable sketches of many of the famous and interesting people who visit her father in Poland Street, Queen Square and St Martin’s Street.

As Burney gets older she begins to travel. In 1774 she sends Susanna journal letters of her visit to the seaside resort of Teignmouth in Devon, where she experiences a frightening ride in a storm-tossed boat with a fat clergyman who is more worried about missing his supper than losing his life. In 1777 she visits her cousins in Worcester, and suffers excruciating stage fright while taking part in an amateur domestic performance of a popular play. Two years later she visits Brighton with her friends the Thrales, and the following year she accompanies them to Bath, whence they are forced to flee by the spread of the Gordon Riots from London.

Whether at home or away Burney never loses her eye for the comic or grotesque. At Teignmouth she witnesses a ‘barbarous’ wrestling match between working-class opponents and is reduced to helpless laughter by an anthem set by a weaver and sung in church by a ‘trilling and squalling’ choir (selection 17). In Worcester she meets an ineffably silly young woman, Miss Waldron, who is persuaded to sing a song in a croaking and squeaking voice, and continues even after a local baronet has dropped a large spoon down her dress. At Streatham she encounters Mr Blakeney, an old Irishman who misquotes the classics, condescends to Johnson as ‘a clever fellow’, calls a Reynolds picture ‘2 or 3 Dabs of Paint’, and tells the same story ‘3 or 4 Times a Day’ about the swollen feet and shrunken calves he suffered from the physicians (selections 62–3).

Of course Burney’s journals and letters are full of references to the composition, publication and reception of her novels. Despite her public shyness she takes keen delight in the success of Evelina and Cecilia. She also records the encouragement given her to write a play, and her severe disappointment upon being forced to suppress The Witlings.

Disappointment is also her early lot in ‘affairs of the heart’.