Fanny Burney's Diary

This selection from Frances Burney's journals and letters follows her from a literary household in late eighteenth-century London through service at the court of George III and into later private life. She records the book trade and theatre, meetings with Johnson and his circle, the constraints of a court appointment as keeper of the robes, and the king's illness. Later entries cover her marriage to the French emigre Alexandre d'Arblay, years in France, and the medical and political crises of her middle age. The diary is a first-person social chronicle, not a plotted memoir: a record of rooms, conversations, and the costs of dependence.

Bound in red buckram blocked on cover and spine with a gilt design. There was a variant binding in darker cloth. Grey slipcase. Blue page tops.