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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Fanny Burney born (12-6-1752)
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2024 21:10:53 +1200
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English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright.
Crystal could have discussed the semantic shift whereby "Fanny", the 
familiar form of the female name "Frances", apparently became a slang 
term for the female pudenda (BrEng, 19th century) or the buttocks 
(USEng, 20th century).
But he doesn't.

Her father, Charles Burney, was a leading English musical authority of 
his day. Her brother James went to sea and sailed with Cook on the 
second and third voyages. He heard Tongans singing in parts 
(polyphonically); his father refused to believe him. The prevailing view 
was that the Ancient Greeks had only monophonic music, so polyphony must 
have been a later European invention. (Or so I've been told.)

As for Frances herself:

"At the age of eight, [she] had yet to learn the alphabet; some scholars 
suggest she had a form of dyslexia. By the age of ten, however, she had 
begun to write for her own amusement."

She was sometimes referred to by her contemporaries as "Madame 
d'Arblay", having married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay, in 
1793.

I read a selection from her diaries and letters a few years ago, and the 
part that stuck in my mind was an absolutely harrowing account of her 
experience of a mastectomy, performed by a team of French surgeons, in 
1811, with (I think) one glass of wine as anaesthetic. "It is impossible 
to know today whether the breast removed was indeed cancerous." At any 
rate, she survived and lived for nearly 30 years afterwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Burney