Sir Brian Unwin leads off with some decidedly questionable assertions. He wonders why the first of his two subjects, the Comtesse de Boigne, should have been ‘ignored or un-noticed by most historians’ — curious words to apply to a woman whose words are quoted in virtually every biography or history of her period. As to his second subject, Fanny Burney, he describes her as a ‘great novelist’. Evelina, Cecilia and Camilla make pleasant reading and were vastly successful in their time, but ‘great’ is surely pushing it a bit? In the vast gulf that separates Barbara Cartland from Virginia Woolf, Burney is nearer the latter than the former but a considerable way from both. Having cleared his throat in this way, however, Unwin provides an entertaining portrait of two remarkable women.
It was a good idea to devote a book to these two, who were so different in background and character yet have so much in common. Fanny Burney was by nearly 30 years the older; Adèle de Boigne sprang from a far more aristocratic background. So far as is known the two women never met, but they were preoccupied by the same issues, to some extent witnessed the same events, and recorded what they saw or heard with meticulous care and in vivid detail.
Fanny Burney was already established as a novelist but had little of great moment to include in her diaries until the time when she found herself swept into the royal circle as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte. She was a reluctant courtier and was happy to escape after five years, but those years yielded a vivid picture of life at court and of the descent into insanity of the unfortunate King George III.
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