author
Fernande Blaze de Bury
1854–1931
A Franco-Scottish novelist who wrote under the name F. Dickberry, she is best remembered for an inventive social satire that imagines London stripped of every fabric and forced to rethink class and custom.
1 Audiobook
The storm of London: a social rhapsody
by Fernande Blaze de Bury
About the author
Fernande Blaze de Bury (1854–1931) was a French and Scottish author, also identified as Fernande Richards Églantine Blaze de Bury. Reference sources connect her with the pseudonym F. Dickberry, and note that she later became Anne Françoise Fernande Richards Églatine Burnup after her marriage in 1881.
Her best-known book is The Storm of London: A Social Rhapsody (1904), a witty, unusual novel in which a vast storm destroys all fabrics in London. Modern reference works describe it as a blend of social satire with speculative or fantastic ideas, using its strange premise to poke at class habits and the rules of polite society.
Her surviving bibliography is small in the sources readily available online, but it shows a writer with a playful, sharp imagination. Some modern publishers and databases also credit her with The Nymph, suggesting that even in a brief body of work she had a taste for clever, offbeat fiction.