Fanny Burney

At the age of fifteen, Fanny Burney made a bonfire of all her works, ‘with the sincere intention to extinguish for ever in their ashes her scribbling propensity’. She was anxious that she might turn into an author, a fate incompatible - for a woman - with respectability. This portrait of the eighteenth-century author and satirist chronicles her literary career, her adventure-filled life, and her influence on the work of later writers.