At first she expresses no aversion to remaining single. When a well-to-do and well-educated young man, Thomas Barlow, tries to court her she resists family pressure and rebuffs him because he does not touch her heart. But in 1782 she meets George Owen Cambridge, a young clergyman whose charm, sincerity and intelligence penetrate her defences. His failure ultimately to propose causes her great emotional anguish. A similar, though less painful, disappointment happens at Court when she is ‘led on’ by Colonel Stephen Digby, Vice-Chamberlain to the Queen, who instead marries a wealthy Maid of Honour.

Disappointment of another sort is caused by the marriage of Hester Thrale to Gabriel Piozzi in 1784. Virtually adopted by Hester and Henry Thrale after the success of Evelina, Burney in her journals mostly shows us the surface of the Thrales’ marriage, which is that of a dutiful and respectful wife to a masterful husband; indeed, Hester Thrale, Burney and even Samuel Johnson call Thrale ‘Master’. But the Thrales’ marriage was an arranged one (the custom among the gentry), Thrale is a philanderer and after his premature death in 1781 the emotionally starved Hester falls in love with Piozzi, her children’s Italian music master. Burney’s letter to Hester just before the wedding expresses the contemporary and conventional prejudices against such a match: ‘Children – Religion, Friends, Country, Character, – – What on Earth can compensate the loss of all these?’ (selection 95). Piozzi is unacceptable to Burney and most of London society as an Italian (country), a Catholic (religion) and a musician (class). Hester never forgives Burney’s refusal to accept her new husband, though they will have a partial reconciliation years later.

Samuel Johnson, who has virtually lived with the Thrales for twenty years, also sees the marriage as Hester’s abandonment of religion, class, morality and (not least) himself. When Burney first comes to Streatham she is charmed by a Johnson who, contrary to his portentous public image, is playful and affectionate; he likes to call her his ‘little Burney’, and hugs and ‘salutes’ (kisses) her with ponderous warmth. But she also records the least attractive side of his personality, which is a compulsion to bully mercilessly in the heat of argument (see, for example, his attack on William Weller Pepys, selection 79). In his last years, after Henry Thrale’s death, Johnson’s increasingly indifferent health deteriorates rapidly, and he reacts bitterly to Hester Thrale’s ‘defection’. On one of her last visits before his death, when Burney mentions Hester, Johnson exclaims: ‘I drive her quite from my mind. She has disgraced herself, disgraced her friends and connections, disgraced her sex, and disgraced all the expectations of mankind!… I never speak of her, and I desire never to hear of her more’ (selection 96).

In 1785 Burney meets the King and Queen at the house of Mary Delany in Windsor, and the following year she is invited to become a member of the Queen’s household. She describes in her journals her grave misgivings over this appointment, her reverence and affection for George III and Charlotte, and her mistreatment by Mrs Schwellenberg, who repeatedly forces her to endure a biting wind in carriage rides which causes her severe eye problems. She records the King’s composure and the Queen’s shock after his attempted assassination by a deranged woman, and gives lengthy accounts of George’s behaviour and treatment during his attack of ‘madness’. She attends and describes the opening and some later sessions of the trial of Warren Hastings in Westminster Hall, which will last seven years. Stephen Digby having failed to rescue her from Court by marrying her, she finally prevails upon her father and the Queen to obtain her resignation, which she thankfully records in her journal as occurring ‘After having lived in the service of Her Majesty Five Years within Ten Days’ (selection 142).

Alexandre d’Arblay makes his first appearance in Burney’s letters and journals in January 1793 at the same time as another fascinating exile from France, Mme de Staël. Despite her admiration for de Staël’s writings, Burney gives in to her father’s ‘absolute resolution… to crush this acquaintance’ because of de Staël’s immorality (selection 155), but in the case of d’Arblay, happily, she follows her heart. In a moving letter of July 1793, she tells her brother Charles that Dr Burney ‘from prudential scruples is coldly averse to this transaction’ (selection 157), yet a few days later she and d’Arblay are married. Burney’s letters and journals reveal the depth of her love for her husband, and their mutual devotion to their only child, Alexander, although he never lives up to his parents’ high expectations.

Burney’s ambition to succeed as a playwright as well as a novelist is manifested in a letter of April 1795 to Georgiana Waddington and, five years later, in a letter to her father of February 1800. In the first we see her conviction that the failure of the performance of Edwy and Elgiva was due not to her incapacity as a tragic dramatist but to her lack of time to revise and correct the piece (she had given birth to Alexander only three months earlier) and to the disgraceful weakness of the cast. Writing to Dr Burney less than a month after the death of her sister Susanna, she acknowledges that the expected production of Love and Fashion must now be postponed, but insists on her lifelong desire to write a successful comic drama: ‘I thought the field more than open – inviting to me. The chance held out golden dreams’ (selection 174).

During her residence in France, from 1802 to 1812, Burney could write few letters to her family and friends in England: war between the two countries made any communications increasingly difficult and even dangerous. Before Britain’s declaration of war in May 1803, however, she does send her father a fine account of Napoleon’s reviewing his troops, and later, in Spring 1812, she describes at length two paintings of Napoleon that she has seen in David’s studio: one depicting him on horseback and the other in his study, where he ‘appears to have been solitarily occupied in Nocturnal studies, and ruminations all Night’ (selection 194). At about the same time Burney writes the most powerful of all her journals: an appallingly vivid account of the mastectomy, without anaesthetic, that she had endured in September 1811. Like many of her finest set-pieces, this was written well after the events that it records. (Her Waterloo Journal, similarly, reporting the climax of the Napoleonic wars from February to July 1815, was composed only in 1823, while a vivid account of her flight from France to England in July–August 1812 was written still later, in c. 1825.)

By 1815, when she returned to England for good, Burney was sixty-three.