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“... For sheer terror, one of the earliest precursors of this particular genre has never been beaten. Fanny Burney was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1810, and wrote a long account to her sister (only published years later), detailing her illness, treatment and recovery. She was operated on at home without anaesthetic, apparently fully conscious through ...”

“... to bewilder. It is easy enough to close the drawer. We have read Boswell’s anecdotes and Fanny Burney’s and Mrs Thrale’s. We know that, half-blind, hot-tempered, scrofulf-scarred and melancholic, Johnson laughed like a rhinoceros and talked like a whale, that he ‘had sometimes fits of reading very violent’, ‘like a Turk’, that ...”

“... some of which appeared in the London Review of Books, include a brilliant piece on Murasaki and Fanny Burney, and an analysis of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and its conclusion by Leon Garfield, coming up with the intriguing suggestion that Dickens – who can tell what the unconscious of that great novelist may have got up to? – made John Jasper more ...”

“... character’, emigrant Anne Francis on the ants and jackals greeting colonists in South Africa, Fanny Burney on her mastectomy, two reports of witnessing executions and five different accounts of hot-air balloon voyages. There is John Addington Symonds’s description of Tennyson and Gladstone discussing Governor Eyre’s suppression of the 1865 ...”

“... in 1990. Behind it, in what can reasonably be called a wooded grove, is the Palladian Chapel which Fanny Burney described as ‘a Pantheon in miniature’. Designed by John Tasker for Thomas Weld and made by Italian craftsmen in 1792, this is widely known as the first free-standing Catholic church to be built in England after the Reformation. Meanwhile ...”

“... letter-writers, many of whom she knew, remarkably little was said about her. Horace Walpole and Fanny Burney are among those who are disappointingly laconic. Even people who knew her well and admired her did so for qualities that did not lend themselves to anecdote. Johann Fiorillo wrote of her ‘exceptional sweetness’; Herder, who later had a long ...”

“... ears and tail flying off in opposite directions. Potter’s favourite authors were Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, writers who have also sometimes been underestimated as purveyors of mere prettiness. Like them Potter achieved her comic and dramatic effects through precise, restrained observation. Her gardens and landscapes are all drawn from nature. Her ...”

“... or, as she was, forced to take low-paid jobs as governesses or widows’ companions (work Fanny Burney called ‘toad-eating’). William Godwin studied Locke at the Dissenters’ Hoxton Academy; a few hundred yards away, his future wife had to borrow copies of Locke from neighbours in order even to read him. Wollstonecraft’s first vindication ...”

“... had written her husband’s biography, subordinating incidents in her life to those in his; Fanny Burney much later edited the Memoirs of her father, Charles Burney, introducing material related to herself as incidental. The best models of female autobiography were fictional. Delariviere Manley, who came closest ...”

“... star attraction of a circle that included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney and Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits of the group adorned the walls of the library in Streatham. Hester presided with remarkable wit, vivacity and in Burney’s neologism, ‘agreeability’; in both contemporary ...”

“... and excitements of a fashionable metropolis. Pleasure gardens were real places, visited by Fanny Burney and James Boswell as well as by characters in novels. They were also places of the imagination, whether that imagination was appalled or enraptured. They were the inventions of a society of conspicuous consumption (‘luxury’ in the old ...”

“... concerned, there wasn’t much to say about ‘women and fiction’ at all: ‘A few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow … a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done.’ Women novelists had come late to English ...”

“... looks very nice. It seems like Sloane St moved here. I believe Henry is just rid of Sloane St – Fanny does not come, but I have Edward seated by me beginning a letter, which looks natural. One can imagine the pleasure-addiction such writing engendered. For the reader, like Cassandra, is seduced by the constant foolery: I will not say that your Mulberry ...”

“... solid diarists like Henry Crabb Robinson or Farington will have made an entry: if all else fails, Fanny Burney will have been told what went on at a first night by someone less squeamish in the choice of entertainment. And for a little filling-in of background information, there is always the wandering patentee, Tate Wilkinson, whose memoirs reveal him ...”

“... drawn drag, then the twist of the head and the crack of doom!’ The extraordinary fortitude of Fanny Burney, who underwent a mastectomy in Paris in 1811 and then felt able to describe it, yields the most astonishing account in the whole of medical literature: ‘Yet – when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast – cutting through the veins ...”