Frances Burney

Based on Wikipedia: Frances Burney

The Woman Who Invented the Modern Novel (And Nobody Knows Her Name)

At the age of eight, Frances Burney still hadn't learned the alphabet. Some scholars believe she had dyslexia, a condition that wouldn't even have a name for another century and a half. By the time she was fifteen, she was secretly writing a novel that would transform English literature forever.

Two years later, terrified that her stepmother would discover her "scribblings," she burned the manuscript.

But the story refused to stay dead. Burney rewrote it, published it anonymously in 1778, and watched in astonishment as it became one of the most celebrated novels of the age. Samuel Johnson, the towering literary figure of his era, couldn't put it down. Edmund Burke, the great statesman and political thinker, praised it lavishly. A young Jane Austen read it carefully, borrowed a phrase from its final pages—"pride and prejudice"—and built an entire novel around it.

Yet today, most people have never heard of Frances Burney.

A Musical Household in Georgian London

Frances was born in 1752 in King's Lynn, a port town on England's eastern coast, into a family that practically breathed music. Her father, Charles Burney, was everything at once: a composer, a musicologist, a charming social climber, and eventually one of the most connected men in London's artistic circles.

When Frances was eight, her father made a decisive move. He packed up the family and relocated to London, settling in Poland Street in Soho. This wasn't just a change of address—it was an entry ticket into the glittering world of Georgian high society.

The Burney household became a salon. David Garrick, the most famous actor in England, would arrive before eight in the morning just to talk. Distinguished visitors cycled through constantly: Omai, a young man from the Pacific island of Raiatea who had been brought to England and become a celebrity curiosity; Alexis Orlov, a Russian count and favorite of Catherine the Great. This was Frances's education—not a formal schoolroom, but a living theater of wit, politics, and culture unfolding in her own parlor.

Her formal education was almost nonexistent. While her sisters Esther and Susanna were sent to Paris for schooling, Frances stayed home. Her father apparently didn't think her as attractive or intelligent as her sisters—a stunning misjudgment, as it turned out. Left to her own devices, she read voraciously from the family library: Plutarch's biographies of great Greeks and Romans, Shakespeare's plays, histories, sermons, poetry, novels, and conduct manuals that instructed young women on proper behavior.

She also started keeping a journal.

A Diary Addressed to Nobody

The first entry is dated March 27, 1768. Frances was fifteen years old, and she addressed her diary "to Nobody."

This was more than adolescent whimsy. In a world where women's thoughts and ambitions were supposed to remain invisible, writing to "Nobody" was both a joke and a protection. If nobody was listening, then nobody could object to what she said.

She would keep this diary for seventy-two years.

The journals became her laboratory. She recorded conversations, sketched character portraits, captured the rhythms of speech that made each person distinctive. When notable figures visited her father's home, she studied them with a novelist's eye. She practiced the art of observation in private so that one day she could display it in public.

But that same year, something darker happened. Her father had remarried in 1767, eloping with Elizabeth Allen, a wealthy widow with three children of her own. The blended household was, by all accounts, miserable. The Burney children found their stepmother domineering and volatile. They mocked her behind her back, bonding in their shared unhappiness.

Frances began to feel that her writing was dangerous—"unladylike," something that "might vex Mrs. Allen." The pressure built until she did something drastic. She took her first manuscript, a novel called The History of Caroline Evelyn, and burned it.

The flames didn't solve anything. The story stayed in her head, demanding to be told.

The Secret Publication

A decade later, Frances tried again. She had rewritten the novel, transforming it into Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. But she was still terrified of exposure.

She couldn't let anyone recognize her handwriting, so she copied the entire manuscript in a disguised script. She couldn't approach publishers herself, so she enlisted her eldest brother James to pose as the author. When the publisher Thomas Lowndes agreed to print it, James—with no experience in literary negotiations—accepted just twenty guineas for the work. That's roughly equivalent to a few thousand dollars today, a pittance for a book that would become a sensation.

Frances told only her siblings and two trusted aunts about the novel. Her closest sister Susanna helped maintain the secret. Their father had no idea.

Then the reviews started appearing.

A Sensation in Letter Form

Evelina is an epistolary novel, meaning it's told entirely through letters written by its characters. This form had been popular for decades—Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa had established the template—but Burney did something different with it.

Her protagonist, the seventeen-year-old Evelina, writes letters home as she navigates London society for the first time. She's trying to figure out who she is, where she belongs, and whom she can trust. She's also trying to avoid marrying the wrong person, which in the eighteenth century was a matter of survival, not just romance.

What made the novel electric was Burney's voice. Evelina is naive but not stupid. She sees through the pretensions of aristocrats and the vulgarity of social climbers. She's constantly embarrassed, often in danger, and unfailingly honest in her letters about her own confusion and mistakes.

The comic set pieces are brilliant. Burney had an ear for dialogue that could capture class distinctions in a single sentence. She could make a reader cringe with secondhand embarrassment and then burst out laughing. She was writing satire, but satire rooted in genuine human observation.

More importantly, she was writing about something that male novelists had largely ignored: what it actually felt like to be a young woman in a world controlled by men. The Encyclopedia Britannica would later call Evelina "a landmark in the development of the novel of manners."

Samuel Johnson read it in a single sitting. "There were passages in it," he reportedly said, "which might do honour to Richardson." This was high praise indeed—Richardson was considered the master of the epistolary form. Johnson couldn't stop talking about the book. He "felt ardent after the dénouement" and "could not get rid of the Rogue."

Charles Burney read the reviews before he learned that the anonymous author was his own daughter. When the truth came out, he was reportedly pleased. Having a celebrated novelist in the family had its social advantages.

The Literary Circle at Streatham

Fame brought Frances into even more exalted company. Hester Thrale, a wealthy patron of the arts, invited her to visit Streatham Park, the Thrale family estate in south London.

Streatham was legendary. It was where Samuel Johnson lived for long stretches, where politicians and writers gathered for conversation that could range from philosophy to gossip without missing a beat. For a shy young woman who had grown up observing from the margins, it was both thrilling and terrifying.

Frances impressed everyone she met. Johnson became a genuine friend and correspondent, remaining close to her until his death. She visited Streatham regularly from 1779 to 1783, absorbing the world of letters and power that would fuel her later writing.

But there was a problem. The very people who praised her wanted to control her.

The Plays That Never Were

Frances Burney wanted to write for the theater. Comedy was her natural mode—she had a gift for capturing ridiculous characters and their absurd behaviors. She wrote several plays and dreamed of seeing them performed.

Her father said no.

So did Samuel Crisp, a family friend she called "Daddy Crisp," who had been mentoring her writing since childhood. The theater, they argued, was unseemly for a respectable woman. Publication was barely acceptable; public performance was dangerous. Her reputation—meaning her marriageability, meaning her entire future—could be destroyed.

They weren't entirely wrong about the social risks. The eighteenth-century theater was a rowdy, unpredictable place, and women who associated themselves with it too publicly could find themselves tainted by scandal. But Frances's talent for comedy was precisely what made her dangerous. She saw through pretension. She mocked power. That was fine in a novel read privately; it was another thing entirely when performed before a live audience.

Many feminist scholars see this as the great tragedy of Burney's career. Her natural gifts were stifled by the men who claimed to support her. She wrote eight plays in total, but only one, Edwy and Elgiva, ever reached the stage. It closed after a single night.

A Second Novel, A Borrowed Title

Blocked from the theater, Frances returned to fiction. Her second novel, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, appeared in 1782. It was another success, though more ambitious and darker than Evelina.

Where Evelina had been a comedy of manners with a happy ending, Cecilia explored the genuine dangers facing women who had money but no power. The heroine inherits a fortune but can only keep it if her future husband takes her last name—a humiliating condition for any man of that era. The novel asks hard questions about money, pride, social status, and the impossible choices women faced.

On the final pages, the phrase "pride and prejudice" appears. A few decades later, Jane Austen would borrow it for her most famous novel. This wasn't plagiarism—it was homage. Austen had read Burney carefully, studied her techniques, and built upon her innovations.

Into the Royal Household

In 1786, Frances's life took an unexpected turn. She was offered a position as "Keeper of the Robes" to Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III.

This sounds glamorous, but it was essentially a servant's role with a fancy title. Frances was responsible for helping the Queen dress and undress, a task that required her to be constantly available. The pay was modest—two hundred pounds a year—and the work was exhausting. She had little time to write and even less privacy.

She stayed for five years.

Why? Partly because her father encouraged it, seeing the social prestige of a royal connection. Partly because leaving a position at court was not something one did lightly. By the time she finally resigned in 1791, she was physically and emotionally drained.

But she had observed the royal household from the inside. She had witnessed King George III's episodes of mental illness—what we now believe was porphyria, a metabolic disorder that caused confusion, agitation, and sometimes apparent madness. Her journals from this period are among the most valuable firsthand accounts of the Georgian court.

Love and War

Frances was forty-one when she married. This was extraordinarily late by the standards of her time—most women married in their late teens or early twenties, if they married at all.

Her husband was Alexandre d'Arblay, a French general who had fled to England after the Revolution. He was Catholic, he was broke, and he was a foreigner from a nation that would soon be at war with England. Frances's father opposed the match.

She married him anyway.

It was, by all accounts, a genuine love match. The couple had a son, Alexander, in 1794. Frances supported the family by writing—her third novel, Camilla, published in 1796, was a commercial success that brought in over three thousand pounds through advance subscriptions alone.

In 1802, Alexandre returned to France during a brief peace between the two nations. Frances and their son went with him. Then the war resumed, and they were trapped.

For more than a decade, Frances lived as an enemy alien in Napoleonic France. She learned to navigate a foreign language and culture. She survived the terror of war. And in 1811, she underwent a mastectomy—without anesthesia.

Her account of the surgery, written in a letter to her sister, is one of the most harrowing medical documents ever composed. She was conscious throughout the twenty-minute operation. She described the sensation of the knife, the feeling of the surgeon scraping against her breastbone. She survived, and lived for nearly thirty more years.

The Battle of Waterloo, Witnessed

In 1815, Frances was in Brussels when Napoleon escaped from Elba and marched toward the city. She heard the cannons at Waterloo.

Her diary entries from this period are vivid and terrifying—the confusion, the rumors, the flood of wounded soldiers. William Makepeace Thackeray would later draw on these accounts when writing his own description of Waterloo in Vanity Fair.

After Napoleon's final defeat, Frances returned to England. Her husband died in 1818. She spent her remaining years in Bath, working on a biography of her father and editing her journals.

The Afterlife of a Reputation

Frances Burney died on January 6, 1840, at the age of eighty-seven. She had outlived almost everyone she knew.

In the decades after her death, something strange happened to her reputation. The journals and letters, published between 1842 and 1846, became more famous than her novels. Critics argued that the diaries offered a more vivid and authentic portrait of eighteenth-century life than her fiction ever had.

This judgment persisted for over a century. Burney was remembered as a diarist, not as a novelist. Her pioneering work in fiction was overshadowed by her private observations.

Only in recent decades have scholars begun to correct this imbalance. Feminist critics have returned to her novels and plays, recognizing her as a writer whose satirical talents were suppressed by a culture that couldn't tolerate women who mocked power. Her influence on Jane Austen is now widely acknowledged. Her innovations in narrative voice and female characterization are studied as turning points in the history of the novel.

She wrote four novels, eight plays, a biography, and twenty-five volumes of journals and letters. She supported her family with her pen. She survived revolution, war, exile, and surgery without anesthesia. She did all of this in a world that told her, again and again, that writing was unladylike.

Frances Burney burned her first novel at the age of fifteen. She spent the rest of her life refusing to stay silent.