Fanny Burney: A biography

The reviews of the book would probably have been good anyway, but Burney, in his acute anxiety to succeed, fixed the two most influential ones, in the Monthly Review and the Critical Review.

(#litres_trial_promo) He described himself as a ‘diffident and timid author’,

(#litres_trial_promo) but he had a ruthless streak, especially when it came to nobbling the opposition (as he did shamelessly when a rival History of Music, by Sir John Hawkins, appeared before his own). His later anxieties about his daughter’s literary career centred on the possible critical reception of her books; he felt it better for her not to publish at all than to risk adverse reviews.

With their father’s absence abroad in 1770, followed by the rush to write his book, and another long trip to Europe in 1772 to gather material for a sequel, the Burney children were left even more than usual in the undiluted company of their stepmother. While the Doctor was in Italy, Mrs Burney found and purchased a new home for the amalgamated Burney-Allen household. It was a large, luxurious house on the south side of Queen Square, an area familiar to the children from their long association with Mrs Sheeles’s school (Burney’s appointment there lasted from 1760 to about 1775). Fanny liked the open view of the villages of Hampstead and Highgate to the north, and rooms that were ‘well fitted up, Convenient, large, & handsome’, but regretted leaving Poland Street, which represented the old days of her parents’ marriage.

One of the reasons for the move was to get away from the family’s former neighbour Mrs Pringle, at whose house the Burney girls had met Alexander Seton, the baronet’s son who had been so impressed with Fanny’s conversational powers. His flirtation with Hetty had been so on-and-off for the past two years that she felt forced to give up seeing him altogether for her own peace of mind, and Mr Crisp’s advice (backed up by ‘Mama’) was that the Burneys should end contact with Mrs Pringle too. Fanny was pained to cut her old friend, but did it all the same, and was ready with some lies when the puzzled matron asked what the matter was. In all ‘difficult’ dealings of this kind, the Burneys displayed unattractive qualities: panic, fudging and petty cruelty, such as in the case of their former friend Miss Lalauze, whom they treated with a species of horror after she was reputed to have ‘fallen’. Their own struggle to sustain their upward mobility seems to have prevented them from behaving more magnanimously to such people ‘however sincerely they may be objects of Pity’.

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Hetty recovered from her disappointment over Seton (and avoided having to join the new step-household) by marrying her cousin and fellow musician Charles Rousseau Burney in the autumn of 1770. Dr Burney was abroad at the time and unable to give his consent. He would not have approved the match; he was very fond of his nephew, a gentle, talented man, but knew as well as anyone how hard it was to make a decent living out of music. The marriage was happy, but never prosperous materially. Before long, Hetty was expecting the first of her eight children (the last of which was born as late as 1792). Her career as a harpsichordist was of course over. Fanny, as the eldest unmarried daughter, now acquired the title ‘Miss Burney’.

At about the same time, Maria Allen was jilted by a young man called Martin Rishton. To cheer her up after this disappointment, Fanny wrote her a poem called ‘Female Caution’, which contains these stanzas:

Ah why in faithless man repose

The peace & safety of your mind?

Why should ye seek a World of Woes,

To Prudence and to Wisdom blind?

Few of mankind confess your worth,

Fewer reward it with their own:

To Doubt and Terror Love gives birth;

To Fear and Anguish makes ye known.

[…] O, Wiser, learn to guard the heart,

Nor let it’s softness be its bane!

Teach it to act a nobler part;

What Love shall lose, let Friendship gain.

Hail, Friendship, hail! To Thee my soul

Shall undivided homage own;

No Time thy influence shall controll;

And Love and I – shall ne’er be known.

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This accomplished poem, which, strangely, has never found its way into any anthology of eighteenth-century verse, displays an advanced state of sexual cynicism in its eighteen-year-old author; men, she claims, do not have it in their nature to be constant, and are interested only in the process of conquest. Friendship (with women) is the only way to guarantee happiness; only among women can ‘sensibility’ and ‘softness’ survive undamaged. The fop and the cad were worrying social phenomena, coarse, worldly and unmarriageable. Fanny targeted such men in her novels and created heroes who presented a new ‘feminine’ ideal of masculinity, heroes who were (sometimes absurdly) super-sensitive, rational and gentle. Fanny admired, even idealised, older men such as Crisp, Garrick and the agriculturalist Arthur Young (who was married to Elizabeth Allen Burney’s sister Martha), appreciated male gallantry and wit, and yearned romantically for an ideal male companion – but she didn’t expect to find one. Her high standards were to cause her some trouble in an age when early marriage was the expected, and only really acceptable, fate of womankind.

Extrovert Maria Allen was the moving force behind several amateur theatrical productions in the Burney household and at Chesington in which Fanny was persuaded to take part, though few actors could ever have performed so consistently badly. Fanny was loath to perform in any way, being subject to terrible stage-fright that almost certainly originated in her stigmatisation as a ‘dunce’ in early childhood. Though at least one of the plays she took part in (Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband) was meant to be an exercise in overcoming stage-fright for the benefit of Dr Burney’s former singing pupil Jenny Barsanti, who was giving up her career as a singer to become an actress (she went on to be the first Lydia Languish in Sheridan’s The Rivals), nothing could distract Fanny from her own performance and its possible shortcomings. Howevermuch she wanted to join in with the gaiety and diversion of a family play-party, the moment when she had to appear, or speak, was one of disabling terror, as on this occasion at her uncle’s house in Worcester, where her cousins were putting on a production of Arthur Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him:

Next came my scene; I was discovered Drinking Tea; – to tell you how infinitely, how beyond measure I was terrified at my situation, I really cannot […] The few Words I had to speak before Muslin came to me, I know not whether I spoke or not, – niether [sic] does any body else: – so you need not enquire of others, for the matter is, to this moment, unknown.

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Fanny had a ‘marking Face’

(#litres_trial_promo) and was a violent blusher. ‘Nobody, I believe, has so very little command of Countenance as myself!’ she complained to Susan on one of the many occasions when her ‘vile Colouring’ gave her acute embarrassment. The causes of her embarrassment varied enormously. It was knowingness, not innocence, that made her self-conscious in front of people such as Richard Twiss, a traveller who on his first visit to the Burney household in 1774 indulged in very ‘free’ conversation with Dr Burney about the prostitutes in Naples. Asked by Twiss whether she knew what he meant by a ragazza, Fanny records, ‘I stammered out something like niether [sic] yes or no, because the Question rather frightened me, lest he should conclude that in understanding that, I knew much more.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The inference of course is that she did know ‘much more’. She certainly knew enough about John Cleland’s erotic Dictionary of Love to be embarrassed by Twiss’s reference to it on the same occasion. ‘Questa signora ai troppo modesta’, he said to Charles Burney of the blushing young woman he had been goading all evening, demonstrating the truth of James Fordyce’s observation in his Sermons that many men find ‘shyness’ in women attractive sexually as well as morally. Fordyce implies that ‘the precious colouring of virtue’ on a girl’s cheeks is the equivalent of showing a red rag to a bull: ‘Men are so made,’ he sighs complacently.

(#litres_trial_promo) But Fanny was much more likely to have agreed with Jonathan Swift’s acid judgement of female ‘colouring’: ‘They blush because they understand.’

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Nevertheless she was highly resistant to sexual flattery, and too self-conscious to be vain. In her copious diary, she hardly ever mentions dress, although much of the needlework that the Burney girls, like all women of their class, were expected to do daily consisted in making and mending their own clothes. She disliked needlework and was not particularly good at it; if her clothes were ever eye-catching, it may not have been for the right reasons. Her best gown in 1777 was simply referred to as her ‘grey-Green’, presumably a silk or ‘tabby’, chosen to match the colour of her eyes.

Fanny Burney was quick to satirise the absurdities of fashion and personal vanity in her works: in Evelina the London modes provide plenty of humour, especially the mid-1770s fashion among women for high hair. In the novel, Miss Mirvan makes herself a cap, only to find that it won’t fit over her new coiffure, and Evelina herself, the country girl agog at the novelty of going ‘a-shopping, as Mrs Mirvan calls it’

(#litres_trial_promo) (it was a very recently coined word), gives an insider’s account of being pomaded, powdered and pinned:

I have just had my hair dressed. You can’t think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on the top of it. I believe you would hardly know me, for my face looks quite different to what it did before my hair was dressed. When I shall be able to make use of a comb for myself I cannot tell for my hair is so much entangled, frizzled they call it, that I fear it will be very difficult.

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In Fanny’s play The Witlings, the first scene is set in a milliner’s shop, among the ribbons and gee-gaws that recur in her works as symbols of luxury and waste. The shop girls are slaves to appearances: Miss Jenny has no appetite because ‘she Laces so tight, that she can’t Eat half her natural victuals,’ as one of the older women observes. ‘Ay, ay’, replies another, ‘that’s the way with all the Young Ladies; they pinch for their fine shapes’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The unnaturalness of fashion struck Burney forcibly (as well it might in the age of hoops, stays, corsetry, high hair and silk shoes), but she also despised its triviality and the hold it had over so many women’s lives, confirming them in the eyes of unsympathetic men as inferior beings. In her play The Woman-Hater, misogynistic Sir Roderick describes womankind as ‘A poor sickly, mawkish set of Beings! What are they good for? What can they do? Ne’er a thing upon Earth they had not better let alone. […] what ought they to know? except to sew a gown, and make a Pudding?’

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Each of Burney’s novels contains some insight into the extent to which women are unfairly judged by their appearance. She was never very pleased with hers. Like all the Burneys she was very short – Samuel Johnson described her affectionately as ‘Lilliputian’

(#litres_trial_promo) – and slightly built, with very thick brown hair, lively, intelligent eyes and her father’s large nose. She had an inward-sloping upper lip inherited from her mother (Hetty and Susan had the same), small hands and narrow shoulders. The portrait painted by her cousin Edward Francesco Burney in 1782 shows a gentle, intelligent and attractive face. She thought he had flattered her horribly, but how many portrait painters do not idealise their sitters, especially when, like Edward, the artist is also an admirer? His second portrait of her, painted only two years later (it now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery), has her face partly shadowed by an enormous hat. Her look is more thoughtful, slightly uncomfortable, but the benignly intelligent expression is the same.

Fanny Burney’s short sight caused her trouble all her life and undoubtedly affected her behaviour. She became mildly paranoid about being scrutinised by other people because she couldn’t see their expressions clearly and only felt really comfortable with things which fell within the circle of her vision, such as books, writing and intimate friends. Short sight affected her writing too; the novels are remarkable for the avoidance of physical description and heavy reliance on dialogue to delineate character. Fanny owned an eye-glass, but was often inhibited from using it; at Lady Spencer’s in 1791 she ‘did not choose to Glass’ the company ‘& without, could not distinguish them’.

(#litres_trial_promo) At court in the 1780s, the use of the eye-glass was, presumably, limited by protocol and many embarrassing incidents ensued when Fanny did not identify the King or Queen in time to respond correctly. She doesn’t seem to have owned a glass in 1773 when she went to a performance at Drury Lane by the singer Elizabeth Linley one month before that siren’s marriage to Richard Brinsley Sheridan; she could only make out Miss Linley’s figure […] & the form of her Face’.

(#litres_trial_promo) By 1780, however, she could be pointed out at the theatre as ‘the lady that used the glass’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Understandably, she hated to have attention drawn to her disability, and scorned one of Mrs Thrale’s acquaintance for suggesting that she could not see as far as the fire two yards away by answering his question ‘How far can you see?’ with a comical put-down; ‘O – I don’t know – as far as other people, but not distinctly’.

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Fanny’s constitution was basically strong, but easily affected by nervous ailments and stress. ‘[H]er Frame is certainly delicate & feeble’, Susan noted in her journal. ‘She is quickly sensible of fatigue & cannot long resist it & still more quickly touched by any anxiety or distress of mind’.