Malice

John Mullan

• Fanny Burney: A Biography by Claire Harman
  Flamingo, 464 pp, £8.99, October 2001, ISBN 0 00 655036 3
• Fanny Burney: Her Life by Kate Chisholm
  Vintage, 347 pp, £7.99, June 1999, ISBN 0 09 959021 2
• Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Burney at the Court of King George III by Hester Davenport
  Sutton, 224 pp, £25.00, June 2000, ISBN 0 7509 1881 0

In March 1815, Madame d’Arblay, the woman we know better as Fanny Burney, was forced by the arrival of Napoleon from Elba to flee Paris and to leave behind almost all her possessions. ‘Books – Cloaths Trinkets – Linnen – argenterie Goods – MSS!!! All!’ When she reached Brussels, she wrote to her brother Charles: ‘Unless some speedy happy turn takes place, in public affairs here, we have lost all we possessed in France.’ There was, from her point of view, a happy turn: the Battle of Waterloo. As before in her life, she was about to become a witness to history, able to record the prelude to and the doubt-filled aftermath of the battle, just outside the city. Yet even after victory was confirmed, she told her sister Esther that she feared the loss of her manuscripts.