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Frances Burney, the Court, the King and Pathography

ABSTRACT During her time at the court of George III, Frances Burney recorded her witnessing of the king’s apparent madness, and her own personal sufferings. Drawing on the recent publication of recovered material in these Court Journals, this article considers some of the problems of interpretation they present under the rubric of pathography. This is a useful term for the biographical and autobiographical subgenre that focuses on illness experience, which has become a widespread literary form only since the later twentieth century. It is argued that Burney’s witnessing and reporting of the king’s symptoms and their impact on his family, concurrently with her display of her difficult, quasi-romantic but ultimately failed relationship with another courtier, Stephen Digby, which occurred within the stressful conditions of the court, make these writings pathographic documents that anticipate concerns of modern pathography. Special attention is given to questions of agency—a concern addressed also in Burney’s later pathographic narrative works.