Frances Burney

Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later as Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. Born in Lynn Regis, now King's Lynn, England, on 13 June 1752, to the musician Dr Charles Burney (1726–1814) and his first wife, Esther Sleepe Burney (1725–1762), she was the third of her mother's six children. She began her "scribblings" at the age of ten. In 1786–1790 she was an unusual courtier appointment as "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre D'Arblay. Their only son Alexander was born in 1794. After a long writing career, and travels in which she was stranded in France by warfare for over ten years, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. Of her four novels, the first, Evelina (1778), was the most successful, and remains the most highly regarded. Most of her plays remained unperformed in her lifetime. She also wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals, which have been gradually published since 1889.