Her Life

Fanny Burney

Burney lived for 88 years, from the age of Johnson until the age of Dickens...At eight, she was "a dunce"; at 15, her father remarried and Fanny declared she would "never be happy". Yet at 26, her first and most successful novel, Evelina, was published and achieved an enormous triumph...Chisholm does a fine job of recreating her world...we are offered a selection of insights from [Fanny Burney's] journal that stand out for their clarity and distinction.

Fascinating...Elopements, marital breakdowns, incest, illegitimacy, eating disorders and hysterical illnesses...One of the many strengths of Chisholm's scrupulous biography is that, rather than cash in on the voguishness of this material, she demonstrates how many of these troubles were exacerbated by the values of their time.

A book warmed by affection and understanding of [Kate Chisholm's] subhect, and fuelled by impressive research...Burney is worth remembering, worth reviving, as a compex and idiosyncratic figure of her times, a rich source of information and indeed a writer of genius.

Kate Chisholm gives reportage that is every bit as gripping, witty and incisive as her heroine.

Persuades us of Burney's value as a writer and will send readers to her work with an anticipation of pleasure, which is exactly what a literary biography should.

Kate Chisholm was born and brought up in the vicarages of north London. After graduating in History from Edinburgh University she worked in publishing and literary journalism and is now Assistant Literary Editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

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, witnessing both the madness of George III 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, being chased round the gardens of Kew Palace by the King. . . She was lady-in-writing to Queen Charlotte; she married an aristocratic emigre from the French Revolution and had her first and only child when she was forty-two; she was in Paris as Napoleon's armies marshalled against England, and in Brussels she heard the muffled guns, and watched the wounded being carried back from Waterloo. Kate Chisholm's delightful biography, incorporating the latest research and illustrate with unusual portraits and drawings, is lively, funny, shocking, informative and deeply moving; it paints a vivid portrait of a woman of great talent, against the changing background of England and France, a culture and an age.

Kate Chisholm

Re-positions an archetypal "great man"  - Samuel Johnson - in a fresh light: as the focus of a network of female friends, bound by affection and rivalry

Wonderfully entertaining...with complete grasp of the material, Kate Chisholm introduces us to eight women who were important in Johnson's life

Fascinating... Kate Chisolm's affectionate, elegant book does the man and the women [in Johnson's life] a huge service

Very good at showing us a new side of a man we might consider ourselves to be familiar with already. I've read quite a few books about Johnson and his times, and I can't think of one that gives such a vivid picture of what it was like to be around him… Chisholm isn't afraid to show Johnson as a weak and imperfect man

Chisholm presents the subject through the eyes of the women who knew him

Dr Johnson in the Company of Women

Dr Johnson is often thought of as a strident, overbearing conversationalist, a man who famously asserted that 'Women have all the liberty they should wish to have'. But in this revealing book Kate Chisholm argues it is time to consider how Johnson lived his life, not just what he said. She proposes that the heart of the man, the truth of his character, can more clearly be seen via his many - close, generous, equal - relationships with women. 
 
At one end of the spectrum were Johnson's mother Sarah; his 'painted poppet' wife Tetty; and the women, like the prostitute Poll Carmichael and the blind poetess Anna Williams, he took in when they had nowhere else to go. At the other end were Mary Wollstonecraft, who refers to Johnson in Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Hester Thrale, renowned wit and Johnson's 'dear mistress'; Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus was an instant bestseller; and many more besides. 
 
By looking again at this controversial figure through the eyes of this extraordinary cast of female characters, we can discover the essential and unexpected Johnson.

Kate Chisholm

Praise for Wits and Wives

Re-positions an archetypal "great man" - Samuel Johnson - in a fresh light: as the focus of a network of female friends, bound by affection and rivalry

Wonderfully entertaining...with complete grasp of the material, Kate Chisholm introduces us to eight women who were important in Johnson's life

Entertaining and enlightening

Re-positions an archetypal "great man" - Samuel Johnson - in a fresh light: as the focus of a network of female friends, bound by affection and rivalry

Wonderfully entertaining...with complete grasp of the material, Kate Chisholm introduces us to eight women who were important in Johnson's life

Entertaining and enlightening

Re-positions an archetypal "great man" - Samuel Johnson - in a fresh light: as the focus of a network of female friends, bound by affection and rivalry

Wonderfully entertaining...with complete grasp of the material, Kate Chisholm introduces us to eight women who were important in Johnson's life

Entertaining and enlightening

Books by Kate Chisholm

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