Fanny Burney: A biography

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What the miscarried letter contained is of less importance than at which address it was ‘lost’, Burney’s or his wife’s, and by whom ‘found’. ‘Some carelessness of conveyance’ – such a throwaway phrase – would have had to involve, in this case, either somebody wrongly opening a letter addressed to someone else, or reading a letter already opened by the addressee. The children had probably guessed that something was afoot between their father and Mrs Allen. Perhaps the discovery of the letter was an accident, perhaps not. If it was a deliberate act of snooping, it backfired nastily. We may wonder, but not wonder too long, given the authorship of that feeling phrase, who it was that found the incident so ‘cruelly distressing’.

Perhaps in order to give the children time to accustom themselves to the situation, Charles Burney and his new wife continued to live mostly apart. By July 1768 it was no longer possible to hide the fact that Elizabeth was pregnant, but she still retained her spacious dower-house in Lynn and spent most of her time there. Fortunately, the Burney girls loved their new stepsister Maria Allen, and took their cue from her generous and optimistic view of the prospects of the new arrangements. Their devotion to their father was such, too, that they would not openly have said anything to hurt him. Fanny’s wording is interesting when she describes how the sisters ‘were all earnest to contribute their small mites to the happiness of one of the most beloved of parents, by receiving, with the most respectful alacrity, the lady on whom he had cast his future hopes of regaining domestic comfort’.

(#litres_trial_promo) One gets the impression that even if Elizabeth Allen had been an ogress, the children would have made an effort for their father’s sake. It does not mean that the shock of the news or their embarrassment was any the less.

For Fanny, writing in the 1820s as an old woman alone in her house in Mayfair, the recollection of this period provokes two strong associations: one the memory of her dead mother, abandoned, as it were, by the abrupt and unwanted change in the family’s life, and the other of her own lost last chance at being given an education. The Paris plans for herself and Charlotte, kept on hold for years, were given up entirely when the new household shook down. Seven-year-old Charlotte went away to school in Norfolk, young Charles went to Charterhouse, but at sixteen Fanny was too old for schooling. Her third-person account in her biography of her father fails to contain the resentful disappointment she felt:

The second [daughter], Frances, was the only one of Mr Burney’s family who never was placed in any seminary, and never was put under any governess or instructor whatsoever. Merely and literally self-educated, her sole emulation for improvement, and sole spur for exertion, were her unbounded veneration for the character, and unbounded affection for the person, of her father; who, nevertheless, had not, at the time, a moment to spare for giving her any personal lessons; or even for directing her pursuits.

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Much has been made of the violent antipathy that grew up between the second Mrs Burney and her stepdaughters, but the relationship started out well enough. Fanny’s efforts to like her new stepmother, whom she immediately and without irony called ‘Mama’ or ‘my mother’, may not have been wholehearted (as is evidenced by the completeness with which she gave them up), but they were sincere. The new Mrs Burney recognised Fanny’s sensitivity and singled her out as a possible ally, though typically, she seemed to be giving with one hand and taking away with the other when she remarked in company in the very early days of the new household, ‘Here’s a Girl will never be happy! Never while she Lives! for she possesses perhaps as feeling a Heart as ever Girl had!’

(#litres_trial_promo) The new Mrs Burney’s manner was emphatic, her opinions set and her voice loud. She was robustly unaware of getting on anyone’s nerves, and, seen in a good light, this passed for artlessness. Certainly, Charles Burney loved and admired her uncritically – referring to her as ‘my beloved’ and ‘the dear soul’ in his memoirs

(#litres_trial_promo) – and the girls greatly appreciated how much happier she made him. Proof of her fondness and partiality for Fanny is shown by her pathetic appeal to the sixteen-year-old to look after her baby if she should die (as she feared she might) in childbirth. The ‘feeling’ teenager could not but have been moved, both by the appeal and also by the role allocated to her as substitute wife to her father:

Allow me my dear Fanny to take this moment (if there proves occasion) to recommend a helpless Infant to your Pity and Protection […] & you will, I do trust you will, for your same dear Father’s sake, cherish & support His innocent child – ’tho but half allied to you – My Weak Heart speaks in Tears to you my Love,

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The baby, a boy named Richard, was born safely in November 1768 and was much-loved by his half-sisters.

As late as 1773, Fanny was writing in her journal with genuine concern for her ‘poor mother’, whom she was nursing through a bilious fever: ‘this is the third Night that I have sit [sic] up with her – but I hope to Heaven that she is now in a way to recover. She has been most exceeding kind to us ever since her return to Town – which makes me the more sensibly feel her illness’.

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This must make us treat with caution the suggestion first made by Charlotte Barrett in the introduction to Madame D’Arblay’s posthumously published Diary and Letters, and adjusted into fact by subsequent writers (including Thomas Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, Austin Dobson and Emily Hahn), that Fanny’s stepmother disapproved so strongly of her ‘scribbling propensity’ that on her fifteenth birthday Fanny burned all her manuscripts and resolved to give up writing. The bonfire, which took place in the yard of the Poland Street house (with Susan, in tears, the only witness), seems to have been real enough, but the motives for it are cloudy. Fanny Burney first wrote about the incident in the dedication to The Wanderer, published in 1814, a piece of writing that seeks to justify the appearance of her latest novel by dramatising her vocation as in itself a kind of inextinguishable flame. Her motive for destroying the ‘enormous’ pile of early works was, she says, shame: ‘ideas that fastened degradation to this class of composition’ convinced her that novel-writing was a ‘propensity’ to be struggled against, an ‘inclination’ to be conquered only by drastic action: ‘I committed to the flames whatever, up to that moment, I had committed to paper’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She tells the story again nearly twenty years later in the long third-person narrative in her Memoirs of Doctor Burney that deals with her own writing history: ‘she considered it her duty to combat this writing passion as illaudible, because fruitless. […] she made over to a bonfire […] her whole stock of prose goods and chattels; with the sincere intention to extinguish for ever in their ashes her scribbling propensity’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Neither of these accounts, the only ones left by Fanny herself, indicates the influence of a third party; the first of them is specifically concerned with making a much larger statement – as we shall see later – about the value of the novel as a form. Mrs Barrett introduced the wicked stepmother into the story in her introduction to the 1842 Diary, describing how Mrs Burney’s ‘vigilant eye […] was not long in discovering Fanny’s love of seclusion, her scraps of writing, and other tokens of her favourite employment, which excited no small alarm in her’. Alarm and, it is implied, resentment.

Hindsight and wishful thinking, as we have seen, are likely to have coloured anything Madame D’Arblay told her niece about this period of her youth. The second Mrs Burney was unlikely to have had any influence at all over Fanny at the time of the bonfire (variously placed ‘on my fifteenth birth-day’, i.e. 13 June 1767,

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘from the time she attained her fifteenth year’

(#litres_trial_promo) and ‘in the young authoress’s fifteenth year’,

(#litres_trial_promo) i.e. some time between June 1766 and June 1767). At these times, Fanny was barely aware of Elizabeth Allen except as an old family friend. Mrs Allen was still Charles Burney’s secret amour; hardly in a position to ‘inveigh very frequently and seriously against the evil of a scribbling turn in young ladies – the loss of time, the waste of thought, in idle, crude inventions’.

(#litres_trial_promo) These sentiments, if ever uttered by Mrs Burney to Fanny, seem to belong to a later and more intimate period.

From the many self-conscious references in the diaries she began to write several months after the bonfire, it is clear that Fanny was going through a phase of experiment, the results of which often dissatisfied her (and tempted her to commit the journal itself ‘to the Flames’

(#litres_trial_promo)). Destroying her juvenilia could thus have had more to do with a resolve to write differently, rather than not write at all. Having read the contents of her bureau through to Susan, perhaps Fanny realised that she had written herself into something of a dead end with ‘Elegies, Odes’ et cetera. ‘Caroline Evelyn’ was a gloomy novel, and she was not feeling gloomy any longer. The fact that she wrote a sequel to ‘Caroline Evelyn’ which used the same characters but transfigured the story into a comedy is surely of significance. As an attempt to ‘annihilate’ the passion to write,

(#litres_trial_promo) the purging bonfire, with its overtones of amateur witchcraft and spellcasting, was spectacularly unsuccessful, and was not repeated.

The journal Fanny started in March 1768 was the ideal testing ground for a variety of rhetorical styles, from the sublime (usually curtailed with self-deflating irony) to the commonplace. The first entry, in which she sets up her alter-ego, the ‘romantick Girl’ Miss Nobody, is pure performance, executed with brio by the ‘backward’ fifteen-year old:

To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since To Nobody can I be wholly unreserved – to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my Life! For what chance, what accident can end my connections with Nobody? No secret can I conceal from No—body, & to No—body can I be ever unreserved.

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‘I must imagion myself to be talking – talking to the most intimate of friends’, Fanny had decided. The second entry attempts this ingeniously, with a send-up of ‘girl-talk’: ‘O my dear – such a charming Day! – & then last night – well, you shall have it all in order – – as well as I can recollect’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The diary allowed her to be skittish, serious, even dull: ‘Nobody’ was a tolerant audience, ‘the most complaisant friend in the world – ever ready to comply with my wishes – never hesitating to oblige, never averse to any concluding, yet never wearried [sic] with my beginning – charming Creature’.

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The first years of the diary (patchily kept up) are the only part of Fanny Burney’s huge output as a journal-writer that can be thought of as secret or confidential. Interestingly, they show that the sensitive, ‘feeling’ teenager actually possessed quite a cold eye. Here she is describing the family’s cook’s wedding:

The Bride. A maiden of about fifty, short, thick, clumsy, vulgar; her complection the finest saffron, & her Features suited to it

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and here a performance of Rowe’s Tamerlane by the schoolboys of the Soho Academy:

the young Gentleman who perform’d Selima, stopt short, & forgot himself – it was in a Love scene – between her – – him I mean & Axalla – who was very tender – She – he – soon recover’d tho – Andrew whisper’d us, that when it was over – ‘He’d lick her! –’ St[r]atocles amused himself with no other action at all, but beating, with one Hand, his Breast, & with the other, held his Hat.

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She didn’t develop this mode of comic writing, but it clearly worked as a release valve for a highly intelligent teenager who was never allowed to utter a harsh word in public. ‘Participation or relief’

(#litres_trial_promo) were the two reasons she gave for keeping her early diary. ‘I have known the Time’, she wrote in 1771, ‘when I could enjoy Nothing, without relating it’.

The creation of an imaginary confidante allowed Fanny to write the journal as if it were a series of letters; she went on to write letters to Samuel Crisp, in the avid correspondence that she started with him in 1773, as if she were writing a journal. To her sister Susan, she was to write journal-letters, blurring the distinctions further. The discovery of how fluid form could be was emancipating: Fanny Burney wrote a novel in letters that people said sounded like a play, and a play that ended up being partly reshaped into a novel. There were also tragic dramas that aspired to the condition of epic poetry and that weird hybrid, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, a biographical autobiography, using novel-writing techniques. It seems paradoxical that a writer who in her maturity was so anxious about the moral and intellectual acceptability of her works’ content should grant herself this licence with form (and with style and usage too). Perhaps both stemmed from her perception of what was appropriate to her sex; ‘lively freedoms’ in her works were unthinkable, just as too much elegance might have seemed pretentious.

Fanny Burney’s inventiveness with language is an aspect of her achievement that has been largely overlooked. Her work is so full of significant coinages, conversions, new compounds and new formulations that one commentator has felt moved to say that ‘she seems worthy to stand alongside Pope, Dr Johnson and Sir Walter Scott as one of Bradley’s “Makers of English”’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Left to educate herself, Fanny had been inventing and adapting words from an early age, and grew up happy to adjust language to suit the requirements of the moment, as a sardonic journal entry from 1775 shows: ‘Making Words, now & then, in familiar Writing, is unavoidable, & saves the trouble of thinking, which, as Mr Adison observes, we Females are not much addicted to’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Family usage encouraged the habit of coinage: the Burneys employed quantities of catchphrases, nonsense terms and nicknames, for fun (a very new word) and the sheer pleasure of invention but also as a form of private language, a family code that was impenetrable to outsiders. The critic R.B. Johnson has deplored Susan Burney’s ‘barbarisms’ and her father’s ‘passion for hybrid phrasing, and the pseudo-wit of made-up words’: the whole family, he complained, ‘was too impatient of solid culture to acquire sound literary taste’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It may well be the case that this generation of Burneys was ‘impatient of solid culture’, though it is hard to see how the characteristic Burney letter style could have gained more than it would have lost from classical polish. Fanny’s success as a novelist owes a lot to the quirky, ‘unsound’ family register which she reproduced in her journals and letters and took, in modified but distinctive and expressive forms, into her published works.

Fanny Burney’s coinage of words, particularly evident in her early diaries, was mostly humorous and deliberately inelegant: ‘snugship’, ‘shockation’, ‘scribbleration’ – these words draw attention to themselves, and were meant to. More widespread, but less obvious to later readers – because her usages have been so well assimilated – are the examples in her work of parts of speech she has transposed or converted: ‘to fight shy’ is one such, ‘to shilly-shally’ (contracted from ‘to stand shilly-shally’), ’beautify’ (used intransitively), ‘to make something of’, and, going from verb to noun, ‘take-in’ and ‘break-up’. She might have invented these forms, and was certainly the first person to record them. The ‘common language of men’ was of perennial interest to Fanny, and the realism of her novels derives in great part from her use of contemporary slang and colloquialisms (such as ‘I’d do it as soon as say Jack Robinson,’ which first appeared in Evelina

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To quantify her impact on English and American usage would be extremely difficult, but some idea of it can be gleaned from the list of ‘Additions to O.E.D. from the Writings of Fanny Burney’

(#litres_trial_promo) compiled by J.N. Waddell, included as an appendix to this book. It shows how frequently Fanny formed verbs with -ise or -ize endings (diarise, scribblerise, journalise) and negative adjectives and adverbs, twenty-eight of which are listed in the New English Dictionary as first appearing in her work, including ‘unobtrusively’, ‘unremittingly’ and ‘unamusing’. Waddell has also demonstrated the extent of her inventiveness,

(#litres_trial_promo) from the possible first use of compounds such as ‘school-girl’ and ‘dinner-party’, to her borrowings from French later in life (after her marriage), which include ‘maisonnette’ and ‘bon-bon’, and her anticipations of Americanisms in words such as ‘alphabetize’ and ‘tranquiliser’. The link between her personal register and forms that were emerging at the same time in eighteenth-century American English is particularly interesting. Many Americanisms deliberately subvert the mother tongue (or, some critics might say, distort it with ugly, overlong, philologically impure neologisms). It is a suggestive coincidence that Fanny Burney was writing her first novel during the early part of the American War of Independence, and that the infant nation was developing its characteristic language traits in the years when her novels, with their heavy reliance on slang, vogue and new words, had achieved cult status.