Fanny Burney

Frances Burney (1752–1840) was an English novelist and diarist, the daughter of the music historian Charles Burney. Her first novel, Evelina (1778), published anonymously, made her famous and won her the friendship of Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale. Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer followed, and Jane Austen admired her work. From 1786 to 1791 she served at court as Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, and in 1793 she married a French émigré officer, Alexandre d'Arblay. Her journals and letters, kept over seven decades, are among the liveliest of the period; one describes in detail the mastectomy she underwent without anesthetic in 1811.