ABSTRACT
Fanny Burney was the daughter of the organist and musical historian Dr Charles Burney. Fanny herself appointed Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte in 1786 and held the post for five years. In 1793 she married a French emigré General d'Arblay, and then lived sometimes in France and sometimes in England. Although she benefited from a culturally privileged environment, Fanny Burney did not receive a formal education outside the home. She was a voracious reader and largely self-educated. Early in life a family friend, Samuel Crisp, advised her never to frame studied letters. Her earliest letters have something of spontaneity of speech. The letter which follows, addressed to her elder sister, is sufficiently familiar to exploit playful punning and use some careless grammar and colloquialisms, but is rhetorically constructed and uses occasionally more vocabulary. The text represents the spelling of the original, but punctuation modernised. Small capitals used to represent larger, more emphatic writing.
