The Burney papers - or, where does an index begin?

August 1984 saw volumes xi andxii of The Journals and letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay) 1791-1840 published at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, bringing to an end the first phase of an editing project that began in 1951 with Joyce Hemlow’s research for her acclaimed biography The history of Fanny Burney. Initially, many thousands of manuscripts were catalogued and some 10,000 of these were included in A catalogue of the Burney family correspondence 1749-18781. Almost as many people, those who wrote, received, or were mentioned in the letters, were identified, annotated and indexed. Some personal reminiscences by one of the editors tell of problems and solutions in controlling this mass of information.