Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  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.26

  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’.27 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?’28

  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’29 – 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’.30 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’.31 By 1780, however, she could be pointed out at the theatre as ‘the lady that used the glass’.32 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’.33

  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’.34 Fanny endured remarkable pain, both physical and mental, in the course of her long life, and survived the appalling mutilation of the mastectomy she underwent for cancer in 1811 with astonishing tenacity and powers of recuperation, yet she appears to have been something of a hypochondriac in her youth, impressed with a belief in her own fragility and half-expecting to die young, like her mother. When Mrs Thrale once exclaimed against the idea of Fanny marrying a man old enough to be her father, Fanny replied, ‘I dare say he will Live full as long as I shall, however much older he may be’.35 The character of being frail, insubstantial, almost No-body, was oddly compelling, and she recorded with evident satisfaction the playwright Dr John Delap’s remark in 1779 that she was ‘the charmingest Girl in the World for a Girl who was so near being nothing, & they all agreed nobody ever had so little a shape before, & that a Gust of Wind would blow you quite away’.36 The ‘Girl’ was, at this date, twenty-seven years old, unmarried, unhappy at being exposed to the public as a writer and not eating well.

  Fanny’s attitude to food and eating immediately suggests some sort of disorder. References to food in her journals and works are infrequent, and never enthusiastic or appreciative. She knew, as we have seen from The Witlings, about young women starving themselves to get into smallsized clothes; she also knew about bingeing. In The Woman-Hater, Miss Wilmot’s unabashed relish for food is seen as a mark of her lack of feminine delicacy, and she characterises her old life of restraint and decorum as ‘sitting with my hands before me; and making courtsies; and never eating half as much as I like, – except in the Pantry!’37 Whether the Burney girls, singly or in gangs, raided the pantry in Poland Street or Queen Square is a matter for speculation, but in public Fanny was a very small eater. ‘I seldom Eat much supper’, she said to Twiss when he remarked on her pickiness.38 The diaries show her at various times satisfied with one potato,39 overpowered by the thought of a rasher40 and alert to the grotesque aspects of ingestion, as a letter to Susan in March 1777 reveals:

  Our method is as follows; We have certain substances, of various sorts, consisting chiefly of Beasts, Birds, & vegetables, which, being first Roasted, Boiled or Baked […] are put upon Dishes, either of Pewter, or Earthern ware, or China; – & then, being cut into small Divisions, every plate receives a part: after this, with the aid of a knife & fork, the Divisions are made still smaller; they are then (care being taken not to maim the mouth by the above offensive weapons) put between the Lips, where, by the aid of the Teeth, the Divisions are made yet more delicate, till, diminishing almost insensibly they form a general mash, or wad & are then swallowed.41

  This exercise in comic detachment is in part a send-up of the congenial dullness of life at Chesington Hall, intended to make Susan laugh, but it is revealing in other ways. While reducing the act of eating to its constituent parts, chewing over the very idea of eating, Fanny never touches on the sensual aspects – the smell, sight or taste of food. Food is simply matter to be made into smaller and smaller divisions ‘almost insensibly’, then swallowed in a ‘mash’ or ‘wad’. She writes about eating as if it were a merely mechanical process, pointless and therefore slightly disgusting.

  Fanny’s small appetite (and her appetite for being small) was a form of self-neglect which had several other symptoms. Samuel Crisp complained about her unbecoming stoop and habit of sitting with her face short-sightedly close to the page when she was reading or writing. She was also criticised for mumbling, pitching her voice too low and being silent in company. Clearly, people felt she wasn’t making enough of an effort, wasn’t ‘doing herself justice’; and they were right.

  Fanny Burney was in no hurry to get married – in fact the idea filled her with dread. ‘[H]ow short a time does it take to put an eternal end to a Woman’s liberty!’ she had exclaimed, watching a wedding party emerge from the church in Lynn.42 Her father was her idol, and she had no intention of quitting him. ‘Every Virtue under the sun – is His!’ she wrote
unequivocally.43

  Many men in the Burneys’ wide and constantly shifting circle of acquaintance were attracted to Fanny, and she made several conquests despite her reputation for prudery and refusal to play the coquette, an activity she found degrading to both sexes. Like the heroines of her novels, she was confident that virtue was at the very least its own reward. Her ‘quickness of parts’ and sense of humour were only revealed to those men she felt worthy to appreciate them, such as Alexander Seton; others were shown the ‘prude’ front. This was as much a matter of propriety and fairness as anything else. ‘I would not for the World be thought to trifle with any man’, she once wrote to Crisp, and her lifelong behaviour bore out the sincerity of the remark.

  The first proposal of marriage Fanny received, in the summer of 1775, provoked a crisis. The hopeful suitor, a Mr Thomas Barlow, was a decent, honest twenty-four-year-old, good-looking and reasonably well-off, who became earnestly enamoured of Fanny after one cup of tea in the company of some friends of Grandmother Burney. Fanny’s aunts, sister and grandmother, in sudden, ominous collusion, strongly approved of the match, but Fanny was unmoved. She thought her polite rejection of Barlow marked the end of the story, but the opposition was marshalling its forces. Hetty had written to Crisp about the affair, and he wrote Fanny a long letter, blatantly working on what he imagined might be her worst fears. Did she, he asked, want to be

  left in shallows, fast aground, & struggling in Vain for the remainder of your life to get on – doom’d to pass it in Obscurity & regret – look around You Fany [sic] – look at yr Aunts – Fanny Burney wont always be what she is now! […] Suppose You to lose yr Father – take in all Chances. Consider the situation of an unprotected, unprovided Woman.44

  Fanny replied to this harangue with courage. Pointing out how unwise Crisp was ‘so earnestly to espouse the Cause of a person you never saw’, she told him that she had resolved never to marry except ‘with my whole Heart’, be the consequences what they may. She was not so afraid of becoming an old maid that she could accept ‘marriage from prudence & Convenience’, and gently deflected Crisp’s fears for her future provision by saying, ‘Don’t be uneasy about my welfare, my dear Daddy, I dare say I shall do very well’.45 Did she think that her writing, still secret to all but Susan, might one day earn her money? Or was this an expression of confidence in her father, in whose career she had such a close interest? ‘[S]o long as I live to be of some comfort (as I flatter myself I am) to my Father’, she grandly told Crisp, ‘I can have no motive to wish to sign myself other than his & your […] Frances Burney’.

  Fanny’s confidence collapsed, though, when her father suddenly added his voice to those urging her to reconsider Barlow’s proposal. The suggestion that Charles Burney could live without her was a body-blow:

  I was terrified to Death – I felt the utter impossibility of resisting not merely my Father’s persuasion but even his Advice. […] I wept like an Infant – Eat nothing – seemed as if already married – & passed the whole Day in more misery than, merely on my own account, I ever did before in my life[.]46

  The crisis resolved itself the next day in a tearful scene between father and daughter, during which Fanny declared that she wanted nothing but to live with him. ‘My life!’ the Doctor exclaimed, kissing her kindly, ‘I wish not to part with my Girls! – they are my greatest Comfort!’ Fanny left the room ‘as light, happy & thankful as if Escaped from Destruction’.47

  To Mrs Burney, the matter must have presented itself rather differently. The girls were not her greatest comfort, and seemed perversely determined not to marry well. Esther had made an impoverished love-match; in 1772 both Maria Allen and her seventeen-year-old brother Stephen shocked and offended their mother by runaway marriages – Maria with Martin Rishton, her former jilt, and Stephen with a girl called Susanna Sharpin. Now Fanny was declaring she would probably never marry, but wanted only to live with her father. With Fanny hunkering down after the Barlow episode as a possibly permanent fixture at home, relations between her and ‘Mama’ began to stiffen.

  Progress with the History of Music was much slower than Dr Burney had anticipated, and although he was working at it obsessively and making as much use as possible of his daughters as secretaries and his new friend the cleric and scholar Thomas Twining as an adviser, it began to look as if he had taken on too much. He had other disappointments and difficulties at the same time, including the failure of his plans to found a school of music with the violinist Giardini and, a few weeks later, the publication of a raucous parody of his two books of travels (The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Provinces had been published the previous year), satirising the credulity and affectation of earnest fact-gatherers such as the Doctor in a succession of absurd and often quite amusing ‘musical’ encounters around England. Burney was deeply alarmed and offended by the pamphlet, and is believed to have tried to suppress it by buying up the entire stock,48 a drastic measure which (if he took it) did not prevent the work going through four editions in the next two years. In the Memoirs Fanny made as light of the incident as she could, though she betrays her strong feelings in metaphors of ‘vipers’ and ‘venom’. According to her, the pamphlet ‘was never reprinted; and obtained but the laugh of a moment’,49 but there was a great deal in the squib to touch her own feelings as nearly as it had the Doctor’s. If he, with his Oxford doctorate, could attract a lurid parody of his books about music, what treatment might not an uneducated female would-be novelist expect?

  In the autumn of 1774 the Burneys were forced to leave Queen Square because of ‘difficulties respecting its title’.50 The house they moved to was right in the centre of town, on the corner of Long’s Court and St Martin’s Street, which runs south out of Leicester Square. Although the air was not so balmy as in Queen Square, with its ‘beautiful prospect’, and though St Martin’s Street was, in Fanny’s blunt words, ‘dirty, ill built, and vulgarly peopled’,*51 there were many things to recommend the new address. It was convenient for the opera house and the theatres, the aunts in Covent Garden, Hetty and her young family in Charles Street and many of Dr Burney’s fashionable friends (Sir Joshua Reynolds lived just round the corner in Leicester Square). It also had the distinction of having been Sir Isaac Newton’s house, which alone would have recommended it to the astrophile Burneys. Newton lived there from 1711 to his death in 1727, and built a small wooden observatory right at the top of the property, glazed on three sides and commanding a good view of the city as well as the sky. ‘[W]e shew it to all our Visitors, as our principal Lyon’, Fanny wrote in her journal ten days after moving in.

  The Burneys were so proud of the connection with the great scientist that they thought of calling their new home ‘Newton House’ or ‘The Observatory’ as a boast. Charles Burney was particularly fond of dropping Sir Isaac’s name into conversation, and displayed a certain ingenuity at creating occasions to do so. Once when a visitor broke his sword on the stairs Burney protested that they ‘were not of my constructing – they were Sir Isaac Newton’s’;53 and on Mrs Thrale’s first visit to the house he said he was unable to ‘divine’ the answer to a query about a concert, ‘not having had Time to consult the stars, though in the House of Sir Isaac Newton’.54 As a sort of homage to their illustrious precursor, Burney spent a considerable sum having the observatory renovated. He did not, however, choose the chilly rooftop perch for his study (a small room adjoining the library on the first floor performed that function much more comfortably), and it was soon colonised by the children, Fanny adopting it as her ‘favorite sitting place, where I can retire to read or write any of my private fancies or vagaries’ – a substitute for her closet or ‘bureau’ of former days.

  Of all the Burneys’ homes, number 1 St Martin’s Street is the most famous.* Dr Burney and his wife lived there for thirteen years, by the end of which the children, with the exception of their younger child, Sarah Harriet (born in 1772), had all left home. The house had a basement and three stor
eys each consisting of a front and back room, with a projecting wing to the rear on each floor. On the ground floor at the front was the panelled parlour where the family took their meals,† and behind it was another parlour (the kitchen, presumably, was in the basement). Above it, up the fine oak staircase, was the drawing room, with three tall windows looking onto St Martin’s Street. This room was the most splendid in the house, and had an ‘amazingly ornamented’ painted ceiling, probably depicting nudes, since it seems to have been something of an embarrassment to the Doctor: ‘I hope you don’t think that I did it?’ he said to one curious visitor, ‘for I swear I did not!’56 Sir Isaac’s name was not invoked on this occasion. There had been three other owners since the scientist, one of them French.

  The drawing room was separated from the library by folding doors which, when opened, provided a large and elegant space for the many parties and concerts which the Burneys soon began to hold at St Martin’s Street. Dr Burney’s library was extensive and highly specialised: when Samuel Johnson visited for the first time and abandoned the company to inspect the books, he would have found few volumes on any subject other than music (although he still preferred looking into books on music to attending the Burneys’ informal concert which was the alternative entertainment). The library, also known as the music room, had a window looking down onto the small, overshadowed garden at the back and contained the Doctor’s two harpsichords. Beyond it, in the part of the building which projected out at the back, was Burney’s narrow workroom, grandly named ‘Sir Isaak Newton’s Study’ (on hearsay), but commonly known as ‘the Spidery’ or ‘Chaos’ and habitually so untidy with Burney’s sprawl of papers that no guests were invited to look in.