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, the first 'royal reporter', witnessing both the madness of George 111 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, drinking tea with the Bluestockings, taking the waters at Bath, being chased round the gardens of Kew Palace by the King. Born in King's Lynn, the daughter of the fashionable music teacher and critic Charles Burney, even as a child Fanny was surrounded by celebrities. Tiny, shy and retiring, she recorded it all, and her deliciously funny and 'vulgar' novels of a young girl is society took London by storm. She continued to write plays and novels, but her private life had its own dramas: she was lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte; she married and aristocratic emigre from the French Revolution and had her first and only child when she was forty-two; she suffered breast-cancer and a mastectomy in middle age but lived on into her eighties. She was in Paris in the Napoleonic wars and in Brussels watched the wounded being carried back from Waterloo.
