She sent her account of this experience months later to her sister Esther without rereading it, and it remains one of the most compelling early accounts of a mastectomy. It is impossible to know today whether the breast removed was indeed cancerous. She survived and returned to England with her son in 1812 to visit her ailing father and to avoid young Alexander's conscription into the French army. Charles Burney died in 1814. She went back to France later that year, to be with her husband.