Follow in the footsteps of Fanny Burney
Who was Fanny Burney?
Fanny Burney (1752 -1840) was a writer of novels, diaries and letters. She lived in England and France at very turbulent times and she kept a daily record of what was going on.
She published her first novel anonymously when she was 26 but when it became known that she was the author, she was taken up by the literary elite of London.
She married a Frenchman, Alexander d’Arblay, and lived with him in Paris for 10 years and even followed him to Waterloo where the battle was being fought against Napoleon.
It was from my mother, Elizabeth Warburton, that I learned about Fanny Burney. She was an English teacher in Australia passionately fond of the writing of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney. She was a great storyteller and I am sure I am not the only person to have been fascinated by her accounts of these two 18th century lady writers.
When my mother came to visit me in London, she would regularly get me to take her to places frequented by either Jane Austen or Fanny Burney. The latter provided us with many varied excursions as she moved around both in England and France. It was no surprise to my mother when I told her that we had bought a house in Burgundy that its closest town was Joigny, the birthplace of Alexandre d’Arblay, Fanny Burney’s husband. Within hours of getting to Joigny, my mother was in the local Mairie getting information about the d’Arblays.
So I have decided to follow up the sporadic visits my mother and I made to places of significance to Fanny Burney and put them into chronological order revisiting some and adding places we did not originally visit. I will use Fanny Burney’s writings to describe the places and will observe how they are now, at least 200 years later. But in addition I have had enormous pleasure in linking some current items of news, history, art, or music and filing these contemporary associations within the framework of the period of Fanny Burney’s life.
All the Burney family kept records, letters, diaries as well as publishing books and articles. They have left a vast collection for anyone interested in their work or their times. What is more, the collections have been carefully developed and treasured in universities such as Duke in North Carolina and McGill in Canada as well as the British Museum, the British Library, the New York Public Library and others. As a result there are many scholarly biographies of Fanny Burney and her family as well as societies dedicated to their works and articles exploring some aspect or other of their lives and times. I make no claim to scholarship just interest and the pleasure of being able to visit the places of significance in her life.
References: Books in my mother's library
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The Early Diary of Frances Burney 1768-1778
ed. Annie Raine Ellis
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The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney
ed. Joyce Hemlow
Five of the twelve volumes
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The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney
ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke
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Frances Burney Journals and Letters
ed. Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide (penguin)
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Dr. Charles Burney a Literary Biography
Roger Lonsdale