弗朗西斯·伯尼

弗朗西斯·伯尼（英语：Frances Burney，1752年6月13日—1840年1月6日），亦称范尼·伯尼（Fanny Burney），婚后名为达布雷夫人（Madame d'Arblay），是英国讽刺小说家、书简作家与剧作家。

她于1752年6月13日出生于英国林恩瑞吉斯（今称京斯林），是音乐家与音乐史家查尔斯·伯尼（Charles Burney，1726－1814）和其第一任妻子埃斯特·伯尼（Esther Sleepe Burney，1725－1762）之女。作为她母亲六个孩子中排行第三的女儿，她从小自学并从十岁开始写作。1793年，时龄41岁的她嫁给了法国流亡者亚历山大·达布雷将军（Alexandre D'Arblay），并于1794年诞下他们唯一的儿子——亚历山大。在经历了漫长的写作生涯与长达十年的颠沛流离后，她在英格兰巴斯定居，并最终在那里于1840年1月6日过世。

Frances Burney (13 June 1752 – 6 January 1840), 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.

Overview of career

Frances Burney was a novelist, diarist and playwright. In all, she wrote four novels, eight plays, one biography and twenty-five volumes of journals and letters. She has gained critical respect in her own right, but she foreshadowed such novelists of manners with a satirical bent as Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray.

She published her first novel, Evelina, anonymously in 1778. Burney feared that her father would find what she called her "scribblings", so she only told her siblings and two trusted aunts about the work. Her closest sister, Susanna, helped with the cover-up. Eventually, her father read the novel and guessed that she was its author. News of her identity spread. The novel brought Burney almost immediate fame with its unique narrative and comic strengths. She followed it with Cecilia in 1782, Camilla in 1796 and The Wanderer in 1814.

All Burney's novels explore the lives of English aristocrats and satirise their social pretensions and personal foibles, with an eye to larger questions such as the politics of female identity. With one exception, Burney never succeeded in having her plays performed, largely due to objections from her father, who thought that publicity from such an effort would be damaging to her reputation. The exception was Edwy and Elgiva, which was not well received by the public and closed after the first night's performance despite having Sarah Siddons in the cast.

Although her novels were hugely popular during her lifetime, Burney's reputation as a writer of fiction suffered after her death at the hands of biographers and critics, who felt that the extensive diaries, published posthumously in 1842–1846, offer a more interesting and accurate portrait of 18th-century life. Today, critics are returning to her novels and plays with renewed interest in her outlook on the social lives and struggles of women in a predominantly male-oriented culture. Scholars continue to value Burney's diaries as well, for their candid depictions of English society.

Throughout her writing career, Burney's talent for satirical caricature was widely acknowledged: figures such as Dr Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Hester Lynch Thrale, David Garrick and other members of the Blue Stockings Society to which she aligned herself were among her admirers. Her early novels were read and enjoyed by Jane Austen, whose own title Pride and Prejudice derives from the final pages of Cecilia. Thackeray is said to have drawn on the first-person account of the Battle of Waterloo recorded in her diaries while writing his Vanity Fair.