Book description
Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is best known as the author of EVELINA, one of
the most engaging novels of the eighteenth century. But for much of her
long life, she was also an incomparable diarist, witnessing both the
madness of George III and the young Queen Victoria's coronation. To read
the journals she kept from the age of sixteen is to step back into
Georgian England, meeting Dr Johnson, Garrick and Reynolds, being chased
round the gardens of Kew Palace by the King. . . She was lady-in-writing
to Queen Charlotte; she married an aristocratic emigre from the French
Revolution and had her first and only child when she was forty-two; she
was in Paris as Napoleon's armies marshalled against England, and in
Brussels she heard the muffled guns, and watched the wounded being
carried back from Waterloo. Kate Chisholm's delightful biography,
incorporating the latest research and illustrate with unusual portraits
and drawings, is lively, funny, shocking, informative and deeply moving;
it paints a vivid portrait of a woman of great talent, against the
changing background of England and France, a culture and an age. Kate
Chisholm was born and brought up in the vicarages of north London. After
graduating in History from Edinburgh University she worked in publishing
and literary journalism and is now Assistant Literary Editor of the
Sunday Telegraph.
