Fanny Burney: A biography

Fanny Burney: A biography
Claire Harman

‘Dazzling…full of special delights. Harman excels in the vivid presentation of scenes, the selection of detail… marvellous and beautifully written book.’ Elspeth Barker, Independent on SundayAt the age of fifteen, Fanny Burney made a bonfire of all her works, ‘with the sincere intention to extinguish for ever in their ashes her scribbling propensity’. She was anxious that she might turn into an author, a fate incompatible – for a woman – with respectability.Her hope was in vain. Not only was she to write four novels (‘Evelina’, ‘Cecilia’, ‘Camilla’ and ‘The Wanderer’), all of which are still in print, she also kept a voluminous diary for the next seventy years and was a prolific letter-writer. Daughter of the eminent music historian Dr Charles Burney; friend of Sheridan, Garrick, Burke and Johnson; second keeper of the robes to George III’s Queen Charlotte; wife to a refugee French aristocrat; detained for ten years in revolutionary France; horrified witness of the aftermath of Waterloo; victim of a mastectomy without anaesthetic…Fanny Burney’s life was as eventful as any novel.

CLAIRE HARMAN

Fanny Burney

A Biography

Dedication (#ulink_60b1a1df-1cb5-5986-add0-82b365b5c55c)

To my mother and my father

Contents

Cover (#uf4df0507-773a-522c-ae1b-62e15f96b5a5)

Title Page (#u66139d2c-b6ef-513b-b6a0-fc032df1bad1)

Dedication (#ulink_6cf68cae-339a-5ca6-812b-a0ed475a49cf)

Burney Family Tree (#u42374d8f-eeed-58f8-aa6f-3f51f1a11831)

Preface (#ua2107e61-f363-5245-bbec-d59efd156236)

A Note on Nomenclature (#u9c9a68ea-6a0e-57ed-adcb-15a05a15adca)

1 A Low Race of Mortals (#u8d0cf0ed-69c9-5ac3-afaf-29681fa1d246)

2 A Romantick Girl (#u2068dff5-7f70-5e87-a296-5681b7396cd4)

3 Female Caution (#u776be2d1-b153-5991-9b45-a5437e3bccbb)

4 An Accidental Author (#u341d111f-f0d4-57f2-a1c1-f69af3381742)

5 Entrance into the World (#litres_trial_promo)

6 Downright Scribler (#litres_trial_promo)

7 Cecilia (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Change and Decay (#litres_trial_promo)

9 Retrograde Motion (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Taking Sides (#litres_trial_promo)

11 The Cabbage-Eaters (#litres_trial_promo)

12 Winds and Waves (#litres_trial_promo)

13 The Wanderer (#litres_trial_promo)

14 Keeping Life Alive (#litres_trial_promo)

Post Mortem (#litres_trial_promo)

Appendix A: Fanny Burney Undergoes a Memory Test (#litres_trial_promo)

Appendix B: Additions to O.E.D. from the writings of Fanny Burney, compiled by J.N. Waddell (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Burney Family Tree (#ulink_f658b640-4ed2-54a6-9e9e-901b34606631)

Preface (#ulink_123ef369-b729-5907-b00f-eb6715d52c48)

Dr Johnson: Ay, never mind what she says. Don’t you know she is a writer of romances?

Sir Joshua Reynolds: She may write romances and speak truth.

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By dint of outliving her parents, five siblings, husband and child, the novelist Fanny Burney (then Madame d’Arblay) became the caretaker of a vast quantity of family papers in her later years. Her father’s archive alone seemed at one point to be taking over her life, for, as she discovered when she began to sort through his literary remains in the 1820s, he seemed to have ‘kept, unaccountably, All his Letters, however uninteresting, ceremonious, momentary, or unmeaning’. She destroyed quantities of these papers and edited the remaining ones ruthlessly using scissors and heavy black ink; a process she applied to her own archive in the last decade of her life and which was continued after her death by her niece and literary executrix Charlotte Barrett, who pasted over more than a thousand passages in Madame d’Arblay’s diary, and cut out or deleted many others.

Millions of words remain, nevertheless, in tens of thousands of family letters, diaries, memoirs, drafts, notebooks, manuscripts and Fanny Burney’s famous journal covering the period from 1768 until shortly before her death in 1840. The historical and literary importance of the Burney papers was recognised early on. Fanny Burney was one of the best-known and most highly respected novelists of her generation, whose ‘uncommonly fine compositions’

(#litres_trial_promo) had been admired by writers as diverse as Jane Austen and Lord Byron. She had also led a long and eventful life which brought her into contact with some of the most famous men and women of her time; David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, Hester Thrale, Joshua Reynolds, Richard Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Warren Hastings, Madame de Staël, Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, Napoleon. She was a member of the Royal Household during the period of George Ill’s ‘madness’ in 1788 and a refugee in Brussels during the Battle of Waterloo: she had been an intimate of Dr Johnson in the 1780s, yet lived long enough to meet Sir Walter Scott. When the Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay were published in seven volumes between 1842 and 1846, she began a new posthumous career as the leading journalist of the Georgian age.

The first edition of the Diary and Letters was a re-editing, with some deletions, of Burney’s own selection, bequeathed to Charlotte Barrett in 1839 ‘with full and free permission … to keep or destroy’,

(#litres_trial_promo) though Burney must have calculated that the loyal and scholarly ‘Charlottina’ was unlikely to destroy much. The diaries have been in print ever since, in one form or another. Some editions, like Christopher Lloyd’s,