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“... 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 ...”

“... unfair tracks by the memory that in fact something very like Murasaki’s experience did happen to Fanny Burney. She was swept, as Second Keeper of the Robes, into the train of Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, when she too was in her thirties and famous as the author of two bestsellers, Cecilia and her rumbustious, read-on first novel, Evelina, which ...”

“... And it is ironic that Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, themselves ignoring predecessors like Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, should have taken their feminine image from Richardson-Clarissa. As John Mullan shows in his useful and scholarly book, the early prestige of Richardson went underground, his ‘fairer and better sex’ taking on its vulgar ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... age, but one in whose affectionate and uncritical company he felt more at peace than with anyone. Fanny Burney, who commenced a journal at the age of 15, gave as her reason that ‘when the hour arrives at which time is more nimble than memory’ she might have a record of her thoughts, manners, acquaintances and actions. It was to be a ...”

“... book of life, or quite came up to the standard set, unless Jane Austen is way over the top, by Fanny Burney. It is generally assumed that these lofty claims have little relation to run-of-the-mill fictions of the kind that Booker judges have lately been ploughing through. And yet it can be argued that even in the present state of things the novel may ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... merely the wonder of his family but of the times, for his astonishing skill in drawing’, Fanny Burney wrote. A detail from ‘Mary Hamilton, Later Mary Denham’ (1789) The drawings in the exhibition include one of Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin, as spectators at the trial of fellow radical John Thelwall, that shows every sign of being ...”

“... to have such things as these is the visual equivalent of a paragraph from Pepys or Fanny Burney. Without the explanations they would be as pretty and intriguing, but much less amusing and interesting.Although the whole four hundred years from 1500 to 1900 are here, they are, more often than not, represented mainly by rich and highly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... can indicate places which once were beside open country. The squares ate into that; the view Fanny Burney liked of the hills of Hampstead, seen across the fields through the open end of Queen Square, did not long survive her ...”

“... men and women of her day – from Lord Shaftesbury to Queen Caroline, and from Wellington to Fanny Kemble – but in describing them she excelled at the vivid vignette rather than the comprehensive landscape. She pins down Talleyrand at a Tuileries reception, ‘crawling past me last night like a lizard along the wall’. She pictures Lady Holland ...”

“... Richardson. Spender quotes a much deeper critic, Ellen Moers, to the effect that Austen studied Fanny Burney more attentively than she did Richardson: this is a half-truth at best, and abundant testimony exists to show that Grandison lay at the centre of Austen’s sense of the novel. For most readers Clarissa was central, and innumerable women in the ...”

“... from the emotional intimacy dramatised in Young’s Night Thoughts. (The ‘Mr Fairly’ with whom Fanny Burney had what is for Guest a paradigmatic conversation about Young at Court in the 1780s was Col. Stephen Digby, the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain.) It is a tribute to Guest’s powers of perceptive analysis that some less promising 18th-century writers ...”

“... 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 ...”