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“... When​ Frances Burney’s journals were published by her niece in a seven-volume series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article ...”

“... feminist for the cheerful little Augustan chatterbox’ which is the conventional picture of Fanny Burney. Stimulated to anger by past biographers who see Fanny Burney as sunny and shallow, ‘dear little Burney’, who class her with, but below, Jane Austen, who are interested only in ...”

“... In England during her exile of 1792, Mme de Staël was puzzled as well as offended that Frances Burney, who was then 40, should have felt it necessary to obey her father’s instruction no longer to associate with the adulterous Baronne. Mme de Staël remarked in some puzzlement to Susanna Phillips, Burney’s younger sister: ‘But is a woman under guardianship all her life in your country? It appears to me that your sister is like a girl of 14 ...”

“... Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Frances Burney. (There are occasional references to other writers, such as Jane Austen.) A segment on, for instance, ‘Daughters’ will discuss daughters and the code of daughterliness as represented in the novels. But the much more interesting sections ...”

“... Andrews) of the Club as powerful enough to revive a decayed university. The musicologist Charles Burney attained a long-held ambition by joining shortly before Johnson’s death in 1784, and recalled it as Johnson’s wish ‘that our Club should be composed of the heads of every liberal and literary profession, that we might not talk nonsense on any subject ...”

“... female writers: Jane Austen, here delicately analysed, but also Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, Frances Burney and others. Dr Johnson remarked that the ‘call for books’ had greatly increased since Milton’s time. ‘To read was not then a general amusement; neither traders, nor often gentlemen thought themselves disgraced by ignorance. The women ...”

“... her among the greatest novelists in the language. They tend to quote what Austen herself said of Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, that they conveyed in their novels ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties . . . in the best-chosen language’. Claire Harman’s book is subtitled ‘How Jane Austen ...”

“... folded back into one’s biological family, then George Eliot seems to have felt it as keenly as Frances Burney. Should we, following the same logic, interpret the popularity of 20th-century multi-generational epic novel cycles (or for that matter, soap operas) as proof that we’re still nostalgic for something we lost in the 18th century? And if such ...”

“... in 1754, Richardson in 1761, Sterne in 1768 and Smollett in 1771. Among his contemporaries, only Frances Burney was at the height of her powers. Neither Ann Radcliffe, whose Gothic romances would soon enjoy immense popularity, nor the younger radical novelists such as Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Holcroft – with whom Bage is most commonly linked – had ...”

“... soon the 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 ...”

“... even in the 18th century, we have epistles written in their teens, and from the early twenties (Frances Burney and Horace Walpole). Johnson was born in September 1709; the first letter of Volume I is dated 30 October 1731, when Johnson was 22. There must have been some letters by the younger Johnson – to his relation and benefactor Cornelius ...”

“... to worry about breast cancer. Mary Astell was operated on for it, and so, with more success, was Frances Burney. Breast cancer – or suspected breast cancer – figured in literature by women earlier than one might expect; Yalom doesn’t cite Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph (1761) or Maria ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... quills. Here is a cabinet of curiosities. In it are a ribbon pretending to have belonged to Frances Thrale (dead in infancy) but in fact stolen from a nurse’s work-basket and fraudulently labelled, a poem about sunsets written by Mrs Williams all by herself with no help at all from Dr Johnson, a tuft of hair looking like something ‘plucked from the ...”

“... the economy is set up and that marriage is not designed by or for women. This again is not news. Frances Burney in her teens, watching a wedding take place at a neighbouring church, wrote: O how short a time does it take to put an eternal end to a woman’s liberty!’ Women don’t necessarily want marriage – marriage is mainly what has traditionally ...”