In the Footprints of the Dinosaur

Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career that gained her a reputation as one of England's foremost literary authors, and after wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded, followed by Cecilia (1782). She also wrote a number of plays. She wrote a memoir of her father (1832), and is perhaps best remembered as the author of letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1842, whose influence has overshadowed the reputation of her fiction, establishing her posthumously as a diarist more than as a novelist or playwright.