Product Description

Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is best known as the author of "Evelina", one of the most engaging novels of the eighteenth century. But for much of her long life, she was also an incomparable diarist, witnessing both the madness of George III and the young Queen Victoria's coronation. To read the journals she kept from the age of sixteen is to step back into Georgian England, meeting Dr Johnson, Garrick and Reynolds, being chased round the gardens of Kew Palace by the King...She was lady-in-writing to Queen Charlotte; she married an aristocratic emigre from the French Revolution and had her first and only child when she was forty-two; she was in Paris as Napoleon's armies marshalled against England, and in Brussels she heard the muffled guns, and watched the wounded being carried back from Waterloo. Kate Chisholm's delightful biography, incorporating the latest research and illustrate with unusual portraits and drawings, is lively, funny, shocking, informative and deeply moving; it paints a vivid portrait of a woman of great talent, against the changing background of England and France, a culture and an age.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #772557 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Kate Chisholm's Fanny Burney: Her Life has been warmly welcomed for its affectionate and scholarly insight into the life of a professional woman writer at the turn of the 18th century. Born in 1752, Burney died in 1840 having achieved fame--if not fortune--as the author of Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1780-82). Chisholm's fascinating account of Burney's early life--the death of her mother, her beloved father's remarriage, her stepmother's disapproval of the "vice" of scribbling--brings to life the historical and cultural, context in which Burney wrote: the origin of her literary career in the secret journal To Nobody; the dilemmas facing a woman author in the age of Dr Johnson and the world of "literary" society; the constant tension between love and writing. A keen observer of her world and herself in it--her wry account of her four years at the court of "Mad King George" is one example, her excruciating description of her own mastectomy another--the publication of The Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay ensured Burney's fame in the 19th century. It is the skill and verve, of Chisholm's biography to make a reader want to turn back to the fiction--and the popular heroines who made Burney a literary name in her own time. --Vicky Lebeau

Customer Reviews

Well-researched, highly readable biography
This is a serious but interesting biography of a fascinating subject - Fanny Burney. Kate Chisholm gives us the details and an analysis of Burney's life and works, but always in an approachable way. Although I'd never ready any of Burney's works and was more interested in her life and times, as soon as I'd finished this biography I couldn't wait to read Evelina, which means Chisholm has done her job well.

Feisty as her heroines
Our Fanny is opinionated, not always nice, individual, and very strong minded. This is a woman who remained single in an age where marriage was everything, then in her 40s turned round and married a Napoleonic general in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars. Need I mention the double-mastectomy without anaesthetic she underwent? Feisty, fascinating, remarkable.