Burney (Frances) Camilla: Or a Picture of Youth, 5 vol., first edition, Maria Edgeworth's copy with an annotation and gift inscription to her stepmother Honora on each title, vol.1 with list of subscribers and advertisement leaf at end, later ownership inscriptions on titles and endpapers, pencil annotations in another later hand, light foxing, some light worming to corners, contemporary half calf, rubbed, vol.5 spine split with some gatherings proud, covers rubbed, [Rothschild 550], 8vo, T. Payne... and T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1796.

⁂ A very good Edgeworth/Burney/Austen association copy of Burney's enormously popular novel.

The list of subscribers includes Edmund Burke, Sir William Chambers, Humphry Repton, Mrs Siddons, and Maria Edgeworth herself. The annotation from Edgworth is the cutting insertion "this is worse than folly" to vol.1 p.12 margin, next to a passage of Eugenia passionately discussing Bellamy.

Also included in the list of subscribers was a young and unknown Jane Austen (aged 20), as well as Warren Hastings (godfather to Austen's first cousin and sister-in-law Eliza de Feuillide). Austen was obviously familiar with Fanny Burney's works and, following the issue of Camilla in 1796, in October of that year she began writing a novel titled False Impressions which later became Pride and Prejudice, a title possibly taken from a quotation in Burney's Cecilia. She also refers to Camilla in Northanger Abbey: "'And what are you reading, Miss - ?' 'Oh! It is only a novel!' replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."