Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  The Branghtons’ ineradicable vulgarity provides much of the humour of the book. Forced to take a party to the opera, Mr Branghton is totally unprepared for the expense of the tickets and makes a scene at the booth, thinking he can haggle over the prices as he might with a fellow tradesman. His purchase of the cheapest possible seats, still in his view extortionately expensive, pleases no one in the party, for they have neither the satisfaction of hearing or seeing the performance properly, nor of being seen by the ‘quality’ in the pit. When the opera begins, their disappointment is intensified: ‘Why there’s nothing but singing!’ Mr Branghton exclaims, and is disgusted by the realisation that it is all in a foreign language too. ‘Pray what’s the reason they can’t as well sing in English?’ he asks; ‘but I suppose the fine folks would not like it, if they could understand it.’31

  ‘The fine folks’ come off rather worse than the vulgarians, although Burney’s depiction of them is necessarily less convincingly observed. Lord Merton and his friends are all (except for super-virtuous Orville) as stupid as the Holborn crowd, and more culpable. Their affectations and excessive language are evidence of moral malaise; while they should be leading society (Lovel is a Member of Parliament and all the others landowners), their time is wasted in gaming, dangerous sports and dalliance. Evelina’s blue-stocking chaperone, Mrs Selwyn, is the scourge of this set, endlessly showing up their ignorance and folly. When she suggests that they have a competition to see who can quote longest from Horace, none of the fops can join in, despite their expensive ‘classical’ educations: ‘what with riding, – and – and – and so forth’, says one of them, ‘really, one has not much time, even at the university, for mere reading.’32 But while Mrs Selwyn’s ‘masculine’ learning and wit is the vehicle for many of the novel’s home truths, the author makes clear that she finds it ultimately sterile. Mrs Selwyn is too busy ‘reserving herself for the gentlemen’ to function as the sympathetic mother-figure the orphaned heroine needs.

  There is no doubt that Evelina’s worth is only recognised at all by Lord Orville because she is also beautiful, but in this profoundly feminist novel Burney gives an original view of the conventional heroine – the view from the pedestal. Evelina’s instant physical impact on other people – of which she is imperfectly aware – is shown as something of a liability (inflaming lustful men and making enemies of jealous women). It is her guarantee of attention, but at the same time an impediment to being truly seen. Evelina exposes – in a way undreamed of by earlier novelists – the double standards applied towards women, in whom everything but beauty and goodness are ‘either impertinent or unnatural’.33 The wit, Mrs Selwyn, is seen as unnaturally intellectual (‘oddish’), and Evelina’s grotesque grandmother, Madame Duval, as impertinently immodest; both commit the cardinal sin of being old. ‘I don’t know what the devil a woman lives for after thirty,’ says dissolute Lord Merton, in one of the novel’s bleakest remarks; ‘she is only in other folks’ way.’34 The lovely young heroine’s hold on her admirers will soon, it is implied, be turned to just such withering scorn, for women past their bloom are not just negligible but irritating – ‘in other folks’ way’ – and a resented financial liability on some man or other.

  The scene in Evelina in which the gambling-mad fops organise a race between two very old women is a graphic example of the point. Like the episode in which a dressed-up monkey attacks Lovel, it has been criticised for being excessive and unlikely, but this is not the case: gambling was the mania of the period and the occasions for it bizarre. There was one contemporary case of a gambler hiring a desperado to prove that people could live under water (the desperado drowned, so the gambler tried again with another), and another in which some members of Brooks’s Club laid bets on whether or not a passer-by who had collapsed in the street was dead (no attempts were allowed to help him, which might have affected the outcome).35 By these lights, the race between the two destitute old women in Evelina does not seem fantastical; Evelina’s urge to step forward and help one who falls over is thwarted as ‘foul play’, for no one cares if the contestants die in the ‘sport’. Who could be more disposable than a person who is not just poor, infirm and female, but also old?

  Misogyny and sadism are linked throughout the novel, from the behaviour of the ‘beaux’ towards women in Marylebone’s sinister ‘dark walks’ to the extraordinary ill-treatment of Madame Duval by Captain Mirvan and Sir Clement Willoughby. The two men, posing as highwaymen, waylay the coach in which Evelina and her grandmother are travelling merely to have an excuse to assault and humiliate the older woman, who is left bound in a ditch in such a state of dishevelment ‘that she hardly looked human’.36 Such scenes, intended as comic by the author, inevitably strike modern readers as both grotesque and revealing. Captain Mirvan seems in many ways a character from the earlier eighteenth-century school of rough and ready picaresque comedy, though Burney defended her portrait of him on the grounds that it was drawn from life (the ignorance of her brother James and his fellow sailors about ‘modern customs’ on shore37 was presumably a running joke at home). This only renders the overall meaning of the book more ambiguous. If Burney really considered Mirvan – the main perpetrator of aggressive behaviour in the novel – to be an accurate expression of the social attitudes fostered in a male environment (the navy), his ‘comic’ status affords no excuse. Contemporary critics are surely right to view both the knockabout comedy and the romantic plot of Evelina as something of ‘a consoling cover story’, consciously or unconsciously hiding a far less acceptable tale of male violence and coercion.38

  Much else in Evelina was ‘drawn from life’, often directly so. The novel contains a sort of guided tour of current fashionable amusements in London and the spa towns (here represented by Bristol, the only spa Burney had then visited), with scenes set in the Haymarket Opera House, Ranelagh, Marylebone Gardens, Drury Lane, Vauxhall, Cox’s Museum and the Hampstead assembly rooms.* This didn’t simply offer ‘a fund inexhaustible for Conversation, observations, and probable Incidents’,40 but made the novel topical and glamorous in a way which Burney was correct to claim ‘has not before been executed’.41 Her expectation of remaining anonymous led her to draw freely on detail from her own experience. Her favourite performers, Garrick and the castrato Millico, appear in the novel in performances she had witnessed, and she includes a scene in a personally significant location, the Pantheon, the new winter assembly rooms in Oxford Road where Dr Burney was on the payroll and in which he had shares. Grandmother Sleepe’s maiden name, Du Bois, is given to the put-upon male companion of Evelina’s grandmother, Madame Duval, and the maiden name of her negligent godmother Frances Greville is given to the poet Macartney (who, as we have seen, may have been based on her brother Charles). In fact, so much in Evelina was recklessly transposed from Burney’s own life that it is hardly surprising she later began to fear detection.

  Before Evelina, the comic novel had been raucous and the novel of sentiment cloying; both types of book had tended towards obscenity, either through the sort of explicit sexuality displayed in Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, or Richardson’s more insidious brand of prurience, which D.H. Lawrence memorably described as ‘calico purity and underclothing excitements’.42 There are no ‘underclothing excitements’ in Fanny Burney’s novels, which is one reason why the burgeoning novel-reading class took to them so warmly. The novel, she proved, could be decent and amusing; indeed, Burney’s moral satire derives a great deal of its power from the author’s feelings of propriety, and the constraints this imposes on her. Her field of action is narrow, but within it she investigates carefully and critically.

  The sophistications of Evelina were timely. In the 1770s some people thought that the novel had already outlived its usefulness, but Burney made it into a vehicle for refined entertainment. Just as Jane Austen was to outshine her literary heroine Burney, Burney herself had surpassed her hero Richardson with a work that can be seen as something of a rebuke to the male novelists who for decades had g
orged on the theme of ‘a young lady’s entrance into the world’ without ever realistically representing a young lady’s sensibilities.

  In the middle of January 1778, Fanny received a parcel containing proofs of the three volumes of her novel for correction from Lowndes, this time via Gregg’s Coffee House in York Street, Covent Garden, which was now being run by her two aunts Ann and Rebecca Burney.43 The new venue was necessitated by young Charles’s dramatic fall from grace and removal to Shinfield, which also meant that a new go-between had to be found. Fanny chose obliging cousin Edward, who assumed the name ‘Mr Grafton’ for secrecy. The aunts, who might otherwise have become suspicious of the traffic with Lowndes going on at their address, also had to be let in on the affair. Their delight and pride in what Fanny was now referring to, with unconvincing insouciance, as her ‘frolic’ was gratifying to the anxious author, but the gradual widening of the circle of confidants was beginning to take the secret out of her control.

  The actual publication of the book, on 29 January 1778, was a rather abstract affair. Fanny had the unbound and incomplete set of sheets from Lowndes, but didn’t receive any finished copies for another six months. If the story she tells in the Memoirs is to be believed, she only found out that the book was ready for sale when her stepmother read aloud an advertisement of it in the newspaper at breakfast:

  This day was published,

  EVELINA,

  or, a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World.

  Printed for T. Lowndes, Fleet-street.*

  Charles Burney was not present at this breakfast, or he might have noticed, as Mrs Burney, buried in the paper, evidently did not, ‘the conscious colouring of the scribbler, and the irresistible smiles of the two sisters, Susanna and Charlotte’.46

  About six weeks passed without any news of the book’s progress reaching St Martin’s Street, and though the author would have us believe that this was just as she wished, it is clear that curiosity and impatience soon began to get the better of both her and her sisters. As soon as the Doctor and Mrs Burney left on a visit to Streatham Park on 13 March, the young women invited cousin Edward round to tea, and together they devised a plan to go to Bell’s Circulating Library in the Strand to ‘ask some questions about Evelina’.47 When they got to the shop, which was one from which Charles Burney ordered new books, Fanny’s nerve failed and all she could bring herself to ‘ask questions’ about were some magazines, only to find that there was an advertisement for Evelina on the back of one of them. This hard evidence of her book having made its own ‘entrance into the world’ was peculiarly disturbing to the young author, who made this interesting observation in her journal:

  I have an exceeding odd sensation, when I consider that it is in the power of any & every body to read what I so carefully hoarded even from my best Friends, till this last month or two, – & that a Work which was so lately Lodged, in all privacy, in my Bureau, may now be seen by every Butcher & Baker, Cobler & Tinker, throughout the 3 kingdoms, for the small tribute of 3 pence.48

  The exposure she felt on this occasion was at least threefold: the social exposure of being read by tradesmen, artisans – even tinkers; a kind of sexual exposure suggested by these people (all men) being able to enjoy for a mere three pence what had hitherto been locked up in a young lady’s bedroom; and, thirdly, the exposure of her inner self through the work. The last is the most significant, and this diary entry is a rare early articulation of the kind of questions about the psychology of creativity which preoccupied theorists and practitioners for much of the twentieth century. The idea of an artist ‘carefully hoarding’ what he wants to express in his work, then promiscuously giving it away, is just that so clearly analysed by Marcel Proust in his essays on Sainte-Beuve, where he says of authorship, ‘it is the secretion of one’s innermost life, written in solitude and for oneself alone, that one gives to the public. What one bestows on private life – in conversation, that is, however refined it may be […] is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world’.49 It is interesting to see Fanny Burney feeling this on the quick as she overheard Edward talking to the bookseller at Bell’s. But as we shall see, her critical and analytical powers (manifesting themselves most often as an acute self-consciousness) were to a great extent to be her undoing. Usually the evidence of a writer’s inhibitions is interesting – as, say, in the case of Coleridge – for the very reason that the inhibitions are, one way or another, eventually overcome. This was not so in Fanny Burney’s case. She understood the conflict between inner and outer life too well for comfort, but was only able to resolve it partially, and her writing suffered in consequence.

  While Edward Burney was at Bell’s Library he may well have bought the copy of Evelina which he took off the next day to Brompton, where his brother Richard was convalescing from a fever, attended by the Worcester family nurse, Miss Humphries. Fanny, whose partiality for her cousin Richard is clear from several remarks earlier in the journal, was tempted to excuse herself from joining the party at Brompton when she discovered from Charlotte that the book, hotly recommended by both Edward and the Covent Garden aunts, was now in his hands. ‘This intelligence gave me the utmost uneasiness,’ she wrote in the journal. ‘I foresaw a thousand dangers of Discovery, – I dreaded the indiscreet warmth of all my Confidents; & I would almost as soon have told the Morning Post Editor, as Miss Humphries.’50

  But the visit went ahead, and had aspects of sentimental comedy which would have transferred very nicely onto the stage of Drury Lane, where Sheridan’s The Rivals and The School for Scandal had been such recent successes. Even on the way up the stairs of the lodgings, Fanny could overhear Miss Humphries reading the book aloud, presumably to the invalid Richard. She had got as far as Mr Villars’s consolatory letter to Evelina after her father has refused to acknowledge her (which is at the beginning of volume two, so they had read pretty far in one day): ‘Let me entreat you, therefore, my dearest child, to support yourself with that courage which your innocency ought to inspire …’51 ‘How pretty that is!’ Miss Humphries was commenting as the author entered the room.52 ‘I longed for the Diversion of hearing their observations’, Fanny wrote in her journal, relating how she begged Miss Humphries to go on with the reading. It was highly gratifying to witness an audience enjoying her work so much. If this was publication, what had she to fear?

  I must own I suffered great difficulty in refraining from Laughing upon several occasions, – & several Times, when they praised what they read, I was upon the point of saying ‘You are very good!’ & so forth, & I could scarce keep myself from making Acknowledgements, & Bowing my Head involuntarily.

  However, I got off perfectly safely.53

  But, predictably, no sooner had Fanny appeared to ‘get off safely’ than a new anxiety presented itself to her overworking imagination: that Richard and Miss Humphries, who both seemed ‘to have [Evelina] by Heart’,54 might talk about the book so much when visiting St Martin’s Street that Mrs Burney would want to read it. Sooner or later, rumours about the book’s authorship, or the truth itself, would reach her father. Delaying this moment was of prime concern. Fanny had already confessed to her father in the spring of 1777 that she was writing a book (although the Doctor, preoccupied at the time by a dispute with Fulke Greville over the money that had been paid to Arne back in 1748, seemed to have forgotten his daughter’s confidence). The longer she was able to keep him in ignorance that it had been published, the more chance she had of influencing his judgement, and perhaps forestalling any serious criticism through its favourable reception by ‘the world’.

  And indeed, the judgement of the reviewers was far more favourable than Fanny had dared hope. The London Review was brief, but laudatory: ‘There is much more merit, as well respecting stile, character and Incident, than is usually to be met with among our modern novels.’55 The influential Monthly Review was more fulsome: ‘we do not hesitate to prono
unce [Evelina] one of the most sprightly, entertaining & agreeable productions of this kind which has of late fallen under our Notice. A great variety of natural Incidents, some, of the Comic stamp, render the narrative extremely interesting. The characters, which are agreeably diversified, are conceived & drawn with propriety, & supported with spirit. The Whole is written with great ease & Command of Language.’56 The Critical Review, Westminster Review and Gentleman’s Magazine also gave the book laudatory notices, and Fanny was right to think she had ‘come off with flying Colours’57 from the periodicals.

  It is hard to appreciate just how low a profile most authors kept in the eighteenth century. Few authors were more famous or notorious than their works; in Fanny Burney’s case, when even her gender was unknown to the publisher himself, never mind her name, age or station, the disparity between her fame and Evelina’s was even more extreme. While society women such as Mrs Cholmondeley were discovering the book and excitedly recommending it to their friends, while Evelina was the subject of gossip and speculation across London, it had almost ceased to exist for the author, who didn’t even possess a copy, and had very little idea of the impact her work was having outside the small group of family confidants.

  Fanny’s ignorance of the book’s progress was exacerbated by a bout of serious illness in the spring of 1778 which put her completely out of action for the better part of two months. She describes it as ‘an Inflammation of the Lungs’, which Dr Burney feared might turn tubercular, and which left her so enfeebled that she was hardly capable of moving. When the initial alarm was over, a long convalescence at Chesington was prescribed. Fanny went there in the first week of May, accompanied by Susan and Edward, who had to prop her up between them in the post chaise, and regularly apply salts to her nose. Samuel Crisp, who was himself infirm, gouty and a chronic pessimist, had probably resigned himself to never seeing his ‘dear Fannikin’ again after the dire reports from St Martin’s Street; certainly, he was just as overcome by their reunion as she, and having kissed her hand, had to hurry away speechless.