Recognition at last for Fanny

When the window dedicated to the memory of Frances (popularly known as Fanny) Burney is unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, her name will join Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters as the only women deemed worthy of inclusion in that monument to English literature. The Burney Society (which has long campaigned on her behalf) will be out in force to witness this long-overdue tribute to the writer whose diaries have given us such an extraordinarily vivid portrait of life in the 18th century.

When they were first published in the 1840s they were an immediate success and have remained so ever since. But Burney was known to her contemporaries as a bestselling novelist.

In recent years her importance as a writer has been reassessed, with a clutch of new biographies and the long-overdue premiere of her stage play A Busy Day, in the West End, which confirmed her comic genius. One reviewer said of the play that it "was about as politically correct as Ali G".

Fanny Burney was born exactly 250 years ago on 13 June 1752. Shy and backward for her age, she appeared to be less talented than her sisters, but soon revealed an astonishing gift for memorising conversations: her father once said of her: "Fanny carries birdlime in her brains, for everything that lights there sticks."

She was given every opportunity to exercise this gift as the daughter of a musician, writer and socialite whose weekly concerts at their home in St Martin's Street (just behind the National Gallery) were attended by all the great characters of the day: Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Omai (the South Sea islander brought to England by Captain Cook).

Fanny would stay silent throughout the evening, watching and listening intently from the shadows of the candlelit music room. But later, while everyone was asleep, she would write up her journal, which she began in 1768 and addressed "To Nobody ... since to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart".

The journals are compelling because of Burney's ability to conjure up in just a few words what it was like to have dinner with Dr Johnson, be at Court when George III lost his reason, or, later, a guest at one of Napoleon's military parades in the Tuileries. But perhaps the most extraordinary passage is her account of how she suffered a mastectomy without anaesthetic while living in Paris with her French husband, General d'Arblay.

Once read, it can never be forgotten: as soon as the "dreadful steel" was "plunged into the breast" she began "a scream that lasted intermittently during the whole time