Fanny Burney

On 13 June 1767, her 15th birthday, Fanny Burney made a bonfire of all her works, "with the sincere intention to extinguish for ever in their ashes her scribbling propensity".

Fanny was genuinely worried that she might turn into an author, a fate incompatible - for a woman - with respectability.Her hope was in vain.

Not only was she to write four novels ("Evelina", "Cecilia", "Camilla" and "The Wanderer"), but she also kept a voluminous diary for the next 70 years and was a prolific letter-writer.

Daughter of the eminent music historian Dr Charles Burney; editor of his infamous Memoirs; friend of Sheridan, Garrick, Burke, Boswell and Johnson; second keeper of the robes to George III's Queen Charlotte; wife to a refugee French aristocrat; detained for ten years in revolutionary France; victim of a mastectomy without anaesthetic.

Fanny Burney's life was as eventful as any novel.This text is the biography of Fanny Burney, one of the the first truly literary woman novelists in English, who exercised a profound influence on Jane Austen and whose own life, spanning the years 1752 to 1840, embraced the worlds of music, literature, politics, English Court life and the French Revolution.