Frances Burney
by Laurel Moore, Grace McKenna, Gabriel Abato, Berangere Decuyper

Frances Burney (1752–1840) was a novelist, playwright and diarist. She spent her early childhood in King’s Lynn before the family moved to London in 1760 following her mother's death. The family moved in artistic circles and Frances Burney had access to the conversation of musicians, artists, actors and socialites who visited her family home.

She wrote stories throughout her childhood and began writing longer fictions. Her first published novel, Evelina (1778) was a huge success and its eponymous protagonist's satirical examination of the marriage market found favour with readers. Burney’s novels of manners influenced contemporaries such as Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, with a quotation from Burney’s Cecilia (1782) being an eponym for Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), an intertextual reference is made to two of Burney’s novels, when a character is asked what they are reading: ‘“It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed’.

Burney also wrote plays and diaries, covering 72 years of her life, which kept a record of readings from her father’s library, life events, her observations, visits within the family home, and letters. They provide fascinating insights into eighteenth-century life, although they were later excised. She also accepted the court role of 'Keeper of the Robes' which gave her a salaried role at the court of George III and Queen Charlotte. 

Surrey can be considered a formative setting for Burney, with regard to both her works of literature and her personal life. St. Michael and All Angels Church, Mickleham, Surrey, was where Burney and Alexandre d’Arblay got married on 28th July 1793. Financed by the successful publication of Camilla (1796), Burney and d’Arblay built a house in Westhumble, Surrey, which they subsequently named ‘Camilla Cottage’. Their son, Alexander Charles Louis Piochard d’Arblay, was later baptised in the village of Great Bookham, Surrey, on 11th April 1795.

After outliving both her husband and son, Burney died on 6th January 1840, at the age of 87. She was buried at St. Swithin's Church, Bath, alongside her family. Virginia Woolf went on to refer to Burney as ‘the mother of English fiction’, a befitting label for the impact Burney had on successive female novelists.