Fanny Burney: A biography

The Burneys were of course all craving to hear Agujari sing, but Signor Colla explained that a slight sore throat prevented it. ‘The singer is really a slave to her voice’, Fanny noted in her journal; ‘she fears the least Breath of air – she is equally apprehensive of Any heat – she seems to have a perpetual anxiety lest she should take Cold; & I do believe she neither Eats, Drinks, sleeps or Talks, without considering in what manner she may perform those vulgar duties of Life so as to be the most beneficial to her Voice.’ Agujari was contracted at huge cost to sing at the Pantheon on Oxford Road (a new venue for concerts and assemblies that was proving immensely popular and in which Charles Burney had shares), and though she promised to return and sing for the Burneys at some later date, the possibility seemed remote. Months passed and they heard nothing of her, only jokes based on the story that she had been mauled by a pig when young and had had her side repaired with a silver plate. Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, showed Charles Burney a satirical song he had written on the subject and wanted to have set to music. It was a dialogue between Agujari and the pig, ‘beginning Caro Mio Porco – the Pig answers by a Grunt; – & it Ends by his exclaiming ah che bel mangiare!’

(#litres_trial_promo) It is interesting to note that although the parody of her father’s book had struck Fanny as scandalous, she was quite happy to join in and pass on jokes about Agujari’s ‘silver side’. It presented ‘too fair a subject for Ridicule to have been suffered to pass untouched’.

It wasn’t until June that Agujari did sing for the Burneys, and then all jokes about her person and criticism of her affectations were forgotten. ‘We wished for you! I cannot tell you how much we wished for you!’ Fanny wrote ecstatically to Crisp:

I could compare her to nothing I ever heard but only to what I have heard of – Your Carestino – Farinelli – Senesino – alone are worthy to be ranked with the Bastardini. Such a powerful voice! – so astonishing a Compass – reaching from C in the middle of the Harpsichord, to 2 notes above the Harpsichord! Every note so clear, so full – so charming! Then her shake – so plump – so true, so open! it is [as] strong & distinct as Mr Burney’s upon the Harpsichord.

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Agujari certainly did not stint her hosts. She stayed for five hours, singing ‘almost all the Time’, arias, plain chant, recitative: ‘whether she most astonished, or most delighted us, I cannot say – but she is really a sublime singer’. There was no more talk of their exotic visitor being ‘conceitedly incurious’ about her rivals: ‘her Talents are so very superior that she cannot chuse but hold all other performers cheap’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The generous free recital, the sublime voice, the plump shake had all done their work. Fanny and her sisters became Agujari’s besotted devotees.

In his Surrey retreat, Crisp hung on these bulletins, especially the accounts of musical evenings. On one memorable occasion in 1773 recorded by Fanny, the party consisted of the violinist Celestini, the singer Millico and the composer Antonio Sacchini, ‘the first men of their Profession in the World’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Fanny could describe in detail evenings out, say at the opera, where they had gone to hear Agujari’s rival Gabrielli, and reproduce the long discussions about the performances afterwards, with what seems to be remarkable accuracy. The guests at one of the Doctor’s musical evenings that summer and autumn included Viscount Barrington, then Secretary at War, the Dutch Ambassador and Lord Sandwich, whom Charles Burney was no doubt trying to cultivate on James’s behalf. This was exciting company for the Burney girls, and the fact that Fanny relished these evenings shows that her shyness was less potent than her curiosity. Some of their guests were outlandish, such as Prince Orloff, the lover of Catherine the Great, who arrived at St Martin’s Street late on the appointed evening and squatted on a bench next to Susan, almost squashing her. His appearances in London had been the subject of much gossip, and here he was, dwarfing his hosts and dripping with diamonds, a portrait of the Empress indiscreetly flashing on his breast. Not that it was easy to see it – when the Burney girls were shown it the glare of the surrounding jewels was almost blinding; ‘one of them, I am sure, was as big as a Nutmeg at least’ Fanny wrote.

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Fanny’s early diaries describe a life of seemingly uninterrupted gaiety in the company of her loving sisters, adored father and some of the greatest artists of the day. The ‘abominably handsome’ Garrick continued to be a frequent visitor, loved by the whole family; on one occasion he picked Charlotte out of her bed and ran with her as far as the corner of the street. When he threatened to abduct the other girls ‘we all longed to say, Pray do!’

(#litres_trial_promo) But as the editors of Fanny’s diaries have pointed out, the consistently cheerful portrait of life in St Martin’s Street is deceptive, since most of the material relating to Fanny’s stepmother was destroyed. From other sources, such as a letter to Fanny from Maria Rishton in September 1776, a different picture emerges:

I knew you could never live all together or be a happy society but still bad as things used to be when I was amongst you they were meer children falling out to what they seem to be now … You know the force of her expression. And indeed I believe she writes from the heart when she says she is the most miserable woman that breathes.

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When Mrs Burney was nervous and dictatorial, the girls responded with outward deference and private ill-will. She was perceived by them as grossly insensitive; perversely, this led them to treat her with gross insensitivity, almost as if they were testing her, trying to prove their worst apprehensions. A cabal formed against ‘the Lady’, and to his shame ‘Daddy’ Crisp joined it gleefully, going so far as to be ‘excessively impudent’ to her face and satirical behind her back, ‘taking her off! – putting his hands behind him, & kicking his heels about!’

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The portrait of Mrs Ireton in Fanny Burney’s last novel, The Wanderer, seems to draw on many of the second Mrs Burney’s supposed attributes (as well as those of Fanny’s later bête noire at Court, Mrs Schwellenberg, whom she called Mama’s double). The heroine of The Wanderer, Juliet, whom Mrs Ireton oppresses from sheer bloody-mindedness and sadism, is forced to act as ‘humble companion’, a symbolic representation of Fanny’s subordination to her stepmother. An explanation for Elizabeth Burney’s ‘love of tyranny’ is suggested in the story by Mrs Ireton’s brother-in-law, who knew the old harpy in youth as ‘eminently fair, gay, and charming!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps the inextinguishable spleen of the Burney ‘Family Scourge’ was, like Mrs Ireton’s, a kind of shock reaction to the withdrawal of sexual attention:

without stores to amuse, or powers to instruct, though with a full persuasion that she is endowed with wit, because she cuts, wounds, and slashes from unbridled, though pent-up resentment, at her loss of adorers; and from a certain perverseness, rather than quickness of parts, that gifts her with the sublime art of ingeniously tormenting.

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Mrs Burney had plenty of fuel for sexual jealousy, not just at home among her stepdaughters (whom William Bewley had once described as Charles Burney’s ‘seraglio’) but among the Doctor’s pupils too. No doubt his male friends teased Charles Burney about his access to an endless supply of nubile young women, and perhaps not without cause: he appears in James Barry’s 1783 allegorical painting The Triumph of the Thames surrounded by naked Nereids, and in C.L. Smith’s caricature ‘A Sunday Concert’ in an obscenely suggestive pose in front of John Wilkes’s daughter Mary. Burney was clearly susceptible to female charms: he became openly infatuated with the lovely Sophy Streatfield after her lover Henry Thrale was dead, to the extent that Mrs Thrale felt he was making a fool of himself.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even Fanny noticed and joked about her father’s ability to make ‘conquests’, though she saw it mostly as proof of his charm. But a wife would be likely to view such persistent ‘charm’ rather differently. Elizabeth Burney may have had much more to put up with in her marriage than we know.

* (#ulink_bbb380e7-07c4-59a4-b130-fa79b45bf34c) Fanny’s impression differs radically from John Strype’s description of St Martin’s Street in 1720 as ‘a handsome, open Place, with very good Buildings for the Generality, and well inhabited’.

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* (#ulink_fde80448-4e5c-573b-87d1-edb8985271aa) It was later renumbered 35. The house was condemned in 1913 and the site is now occupied by the Westminster Reference Library.

† (#ulink_fde80448-4e5c-573b-87d1-edb8985271aa) This room in the Burneys’ house has been reconstructed at Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, using the original panelling and mantelpiece.

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4 An Accidental Author (#ulink_2a8960bb-7e24-5c89-8d81-a3ec7e61641c)

From the origin of her first literary attempt, [she] might almost be called an accidental author.

Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney

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Fanny’s diary was not addressed to ‘Nobody’ for long. Craving news from town and the company of his dear Burney girls, Samuel Crisp had developed an apparently insatiable appetite for their letters, and singled out Fanny’s as the best. His attention was extremely gratifying to the ‘little dunce’ and encouraged her to invest time and effort in the correspondence. Her diary gradually modulated into a series of journal-letters to the hermit of Chesington which Crisp felt free to circulate to his sister and her friends.

While it stimulated Fanny to have a discerning and appreciative audience (in a way that addressing passive ‘Nobody’ could never do), there was of course a danger that these semi-public letters might become self-conscious. Fortunately, Crisp was not only a forthright man but astute, and foresaw the kind of inhibitions to which Fanny might be prey. ‘I profess there is not a single word or expression, or thought in your whole letter,’ he wrote in the winter of 1773, when their correspondence was just taking root, ‘that I do not relish’:

– not that in our Correspondence, I shall set up for a Critic, or schoolmaster, or Observer of Composition – Damn it all! – I hate it if once You set about framing studied letters, that are to be correct, nicely grammatical & run in smooth Periods, I shall mind them as no others than newspapers of intelligence; I make this preface because You have needlessly enjoin’d me to deal sincerely, & to tell You of your faults; & so let this declaration serve once for all, that there is no fault in an Epistolary Correspondence, like stiffness, & study – Dash away, whatever comes uppermost – the sudden sallies of imagination, clap’d down on paper, just as they arise, are worth Folios, & have all the warmth & merit of that sort of Nonsense, that is Eloquent in Love – never think of being correct, when You write to me.

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Crisp granted Fanny a licence to be natural, and the benefits were enormous. He encouraged her to entertain him, not with anything fanciful or affected, but with the events of her everyday life, written in her everyday language, really as if she were talking to him. It was in their degree of deviation from ‘nicely grammatical’ writing that he would judge the vitality of her letters. Uneducated Fanny had appealed to the family monitor to correct her faults, and he had replied that she wasn’t to give her style a moment’s notice.

‘Dash away, whatever comes uppermost’: Fanny’s letters to Crisp became studiedly informal, making use of character sketches and long passages of dialogue as a substitute for straightforward chronicling. The success of the formula must have influenced her decision to cast the latest of her ‘writings’ in epistolary form, and the sheer familiarity of writing to Crisp suggested the story’s central correspondence between a young lady in the city (Evelina) and an old mentor in the sticks. Writing a novel as a series of letters suited the author’s circumstances, too. In a household where there was little privacy, the excuse of ‘writing a letter’ would have helped keep her compositions secret.

The epistolary novel was the most popular form of the day, and the trademark of Fanny’s literary hero, Richardson, though in Evelina she uses it more cleverly than he. Having, like Richardson, presented herself as the editor of the letters (thereby setting up the mild pretence of them being real), she ‘edits out’ parts of the correspondence, plants references in the text to ‘missing’ letters, has letters cross in the post, get diverted, forged, delayed (notably in the case of the one from the heroine’s dead mother, pivotal to the resolution of the plot). The model of Fanny’s real correspondence with Crisp was most valuable, though, in discouraging her from attempting too ‘literary’ a style. Evelina’s breathless note to her guardian on her arrival in London, for instance, has an irresistible realism:

This moment arrived. Just going to Drury-Lane Theatre. The celebrated Mr. Garrick performs Ranger. I am quite in extacy. So is Miss Mirvan. How fortunate, that he should happen to play! We would not let Mrs. Mirvan rest till she had consented to go; her chief objection was to our dress, for we have had no time to Londonize ourselves; but we teazed her into compliance, and so we are to sit in some obscure place, that she may not be seen.

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Evelina bears none of the marks of having been worked on for up to ten years, though in the Memoirs the author asserts that much of the story had been ‘pent up’ in her head since the time of the composition of ‘Caroline Evelyn’, the manuscript novel destroyed in Poland Street in 1766 or 1767.

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(#litres_trial_promo) (but presumably written under the supervision of her aunt) adds that the earlier story had featured several characters who reappear in the ‘daughter’ novel: Lady Howard, Mr Villars, Miss Mirvan, Sir John Belmont and Madame Duval. These characters were so real to Fanny that she couldn’t help revolving their circumstances and personalities long after the manuscript containing their history had ceased to exist. ‘My bureau was cleared,’ she wrote, many years later, ‘but my head was not emptied.’

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It is likely that Evelina was one of the ‘writings’ Fanny Burney mentions in her diaries of 1770, 1771 and 1772. The two following years were burdened with copying as Dr Burney hurried to finish the first volume of his History, and it was probably only after the publication of that book in 1775 that Fanny had much time for her own work. In the early stages, there was little motivation to write the story down, except perhaps a desire to circulate a readable manuscript among her siblings and the Chesington Hall set. ‘Writing, indeed,’ as Madame d’Arblay confessed later, ‘was far more difficult to her than composing.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Writing down also meant pinning down, and an end to the pleasurable composing process.

Nevertheless, in the summer of 1776, when Dr and Mrs Burney had gone to Bristol and Fanny was left to her own devices with only the toddler Sally and the servants for company, she settled down with a hitherto unknown single-mindedness and wrote most of what is now Evelina’s second volume. By the end of the year she was beginning to negotiate with publishers.

The step from indulging in private ‘vagaries’ to producing two volumes of a full-length novel and soliciting its publication is so momentous that we may well wonder what prompted Fanny Burney to take it, or even think of it. The reason given in the Memoirs does not sound like the whole truth:

When the little narrative, however slowly, from the impediments that always annoy what requires secrecy, began to assume a ‘questionable shape;’ a wish – as vague, at first, as it was fantastic – crossed the brain of the writer, to ‘see her work in print.’

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