Letter, which has been digitised by the British Library for the first time, recounts the novelist’s agonising experience of surgery in an age before anaesthesia
Fanny Burney’s graphic account of her mastectomy without anaesthetic in 1811, in which the novelist writes to her sister how she “began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision – & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still! so excruciating was the agony” – has been fully digitised and placed online for the first time by the British Library.
One of more than 300 manuscripts, letters and first editions from the Restoration and 18th century collection digitised for the library’s Discovering Literature venture, Burney’s 12-page letter sees the author of Evelina explain to her sister that she was eventually persuaded to go ahead with the operation by her doctors after her breast cancer diagnosis a year before. Ensuring that her husband and son were absent, she submitted to her surgeons at her home in Paris.
Related: Fanny Burney wrote one of the most courageous pieces of work I’ve ever encountered
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