Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  Fanny’s recovery was slow, but in June she began to feel well enough to continue her journal. One of the first conversations she chose to record was an example of Mrs Hamilton’s niece Kitty Cooke in full spate against Mrs Burney, whom Kitty obviously felt should have brought Fanny to Chesington herself, rather than leaving the chaperonage to Edward and Susan: ‘but you know, [three words effaced] what a thing it would be for a fine lady to bring a sick person!’ Edward was clearly shocked by Miss Cooke’s speech, as was Fanny, though she says she was too weak and tired to raise an objection. It seems unlikely that she would have objected in any case – Susan was uncomfortable, but only laughed nervously, and if Fanny had not secretly relished hearing criticism of her stepmother by someone they all considered ‘utterly incapable of art’, she need not have recorded quite so much of it. ‘“To be sure she [Mrs Burney] did well to stay away,”’ Kitty rattled on, ‘“for she knows we none of us love her; she could only think of coming to mortify us; for one must be civil to her, for the Doctor’s sake. – but she’s such a queer fish, – to be sure, for a sensible woman, as she is, she has a great many oddities; & as to Mr Crisp, he says he’s quite sick of her, d – her, he says, I wish she was Dead! for, you know, for such a good soul as the Doctor to have such a Wife, – to be sure there’s something very disagreeable in her, – Laughing so loud, & hooting, & clapping her Hands, – I can’t love her, a nasty old Cat, – yet she’s certainly a very sensible Woman.”’58 No wonder Edward ‘couldn’t keep his Countenance’59 at this outburst, so strongly dramatised by the diarist. If Miss Cooke’s claim that ‘none of us loves’ the ‘nasty old Cat’ is shocking, even more so is her blurting out of Crisp’s malicious private opinion of Mrs Burney, his view of her unworthiness as wife to the Doctor, and his wish that she were dead. And the more Fanny Burney tried to mitigate the effect in her diary by saying that Kitty was an ‘unguarded Creature […] without the slightest notion of the impropriety of which she was guilty’, the more likely one is to believe that what Kitty says is also true.

  Mrs Burney did not come off much better at Streatham, where her husband was enjoying a blossoming friendship with Mrs Thrale and her circle. In the classification tables of her acquaintances’ qualities that Mrs Thrale was amusing herself with that summer, Elizabeth Burney scored an average ‘10’ (out of twenty) for ‘Worth of Heart’, but a miserable ‘o’ under the heading ‘Person, Mien & Manner’.60 Perhaps the very insensitivity that Miss Cooke found ‘disagreeable’ provided Mrs Burney with some protection against the dislike of almost all her husband’s family and friends – certainly she was given the cold shoulder as often as possible, which the Doctor could scarcely have failed to notice.

  A letter from Mrs Burney to Fanny written around this time (and presumably kept as an exemplum, since Fanny wrote ‘in the style of a certain Lady –’ at the top of it) gives some idea of the odd manner that so riled Crisp and failed to impress Mrs Thrale. The whole letter is written in a jerky, inconsequential style, with many impenetrable coinages and cryptic references. At some points, Mrs Burney’s sentences seem to run parallel to their meaning; she gives the bizarre impression of having made up both the vocabulary and the syntax as she went along. One example is a passage which presumably refers to Mrs Burney’s youngest child, Sarah, who was then six years old: ‘That nibbetting yepping thing snitch* stands gloring over my papers, & says she wonders what I am writing; but I tell her wondring is n’t good for her – & to stop her yep have sent her for a wafer’. Or this, about the maid Betty, ‘that Stothering Creter’, whom Hetty Burney had recently dismissed: ‘she’l never be good for anything while her eyes are open – the creter is to me aversion upon aversions – she was so rude the last time I drank tea with her mistress when I only wanted her to bring me up a glass of water – that tho’ I went to the top of the Kitchen stairs & cried “is this body here”? half a hundred times she never made me any answer!’61 Perhaps Betty was taking her cue from what she had overheard Hetty and her sisters say in private about ‘the Lady’s’ embarrassing behaviour. Hetty herself clearly didn’t feel inclined to reprimand her servant on this occasion.

  The longueurs of convalescence at Chesington made Fanny restless. She had promised that Hetty would be allowed to read Evelina to Crisp – without disclosing her secret, of course – but began to want to witness his response to the book herself. Pretending that Hetty had introduced Evelina at Brompton, she tried to get Crisp interested in it, and eventually he agreed to have it read aloud. ‘I found it a much more awkward thing than I had expected,’ Fanny wrote in her journal; ‘my voice quite faltered when I began it, which, however, I passed off for the effect of remaining weakness of Lungs; &, in short, from an invincible embarrassment, which I could not for a page together repress, the Book, by my reading, lost all manner of spirit.’62 To avoid having to finish the book, she told him that the third volume was missing: ‘To be sure, the concealment of this affair has cost me no few Inventions’, Fanny reflected later. ‘I have no alternative, but avowing myself for an authoress, which I cannot bear to think of.’

  Fanny may not have understood at the time of writing Evelina, but soon learned, that guessing the authorship of an anonymous work was a common pastime among the London reading class: in her play The Witlings, written in the year following the publication of Evelina, but never produced, Burney’s Lady Smatter, a rather crudely caricatured blue-stocking, causes mischief by frivolously indulging in this game: ‘I am never at rest’, she says, ‘till I have discovered the authors of every thing that comes out; and, indeed, I commonly hit upon them in a moment.’63 By not including the words ‘By a Lady’ on the title page, Fanny Burney had presumably wanted her novel to be read without any gender prejudice; but it must also have been clear to her that any sensitive reader would guess the author’s sex from the work. Apart from the obvious woman-centredness of the plot and viewpoint of Evelina and the physicality of much of the description, there is the whole force of the novelty of her portrayal of female sensibility. All Fanny could hope to conceal in the long term was her personal connection.

  People in the Burneys’ circle were starting to read the book, and Fanny listened avidly to reports of their opinions. Lady Hales and Miss Coussmaker were besotted with Evelina, apparently, and could hardly talk of anything else. But when Lady Hales declared that the author must be ‘a man of great abilities’, Miss Coussmaker replied firmly that ‘the Writer was a Woman, for […] there was such a remarkable delicacy in the conversations & descriptions, notwithstanding the grossness & vulgarity of some of the Characters, […] that she could not but suspect the Writer was a Female, but, she added, notwithstanding the preface declared the Writer never would be known, she hoped, if the Book circulated as she expected it would, he or she, would be tempted to discovery’. Fanny Burney’s private response was exultant: ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! – that’s my answer. They little think how well they are already acquainted with the Writer they so much honour.’64 The trick seemed to be working.

  Fanny was still very anxious about her father’s possible disapproval, either of the work in particular or of the secrecy with which she had published it. There is no doubting the veneration she felt for her father – ‘the author of my being’, to use her suggestive phrase from the dedicatory verses to Evelina – but it had a neurotic edge which was absent from all the Doctor’s feelings towards her. If she had conceived an illegitimate child she couldn’t have tried harder to cover it up, and yet at the same time there is a perverse sense in which she was longing to ‘come clean’ with him about her authorship, and justify her efforts by openly winning his approval.

  There was already speculation in Mrs Thrale’s circle that the Doctor himself might be the author of Evelina, and Susan Burney must have realised that if the book came into his hands, he would immediately recognise the autobiographical incidents and allusions which Fanny had used. In what was a very well-judged and considerate piece of meddling – only revealed in a fragmentary memoir written by Dr
Burney between 1792 and 1806 – Susan decided that the time had come to tell their father the secret while her sister was out of the way in Chesington.

  The Doctor’s benign reaction to the revelation (and his refusal to say how he was told) suggests that Susan and Charlotte presented the news as another family conspiracy, this time to alleviate Fanny’s massive anxieties. In the wake of her illness, which they had all sincerely considered life-threatening, both the sisters and Dr Burney must have feared a relapse. The odd thing is that Fanny did not guess what had happened. When she received Charlotte’s letter – ‘the most interesting that could be written to me’ – with the news that their father was reading Evelina, she paraphrased its contents thus:

  How this has come to pass, I am yet in the dark: but, it seems, the very moment, almost, that my mother & Susan & Sally left the House [to go to Chesington], he desired Charlotte to bring him the Monthly Review; […] He read it with great earnestness, – then put it down; & presently after, snatched it up, & read it again. Doubtless his paternal Heart felt some agitation for his Girl, in reading a review of her Publication! – how he got at the name, I cannot imagine!65

  According to his own account, Charles Burney took up the first volume ‘with fear & trembling’,66 but soon saw that the work was nothing to shame the family name further – quite the contrary. Susan passed on all his reactions to her sister, sitting agog over these letters in Chesington: he had begun reading it with Lady Hales and Miss Coussmaker; he admired Villars’s pathetic style; he thought the preface ‘vastly strong’, and opined – clearly regretting his daughter’s unworldliness on this count – that Lowndes had had a ‘devilish good bargain’ for his twenty guineas.

  The further the Doctor went in the book, the more lavish his praise. By 16 June, Susan was reporting that he thought it ‘the best Novel I know excepting Fielding’s [Amelia], – &, in some respects, it is better than his!’ How much of a reader of novels Burney was is hard to ascertain: Amelia was the only novel he saw fit to keep in his library, and for all his genuine paternal pride over Evelina, he had no qualms about selling his set on to Lady Hales as soon as he had finished reading it.

  Fanny heard with mixed gratification and amusement how Evelina was ‘travelling in the Great World’: it seemed that half of Lady Hales’s acquaintance were blubbering over it at once. When she wrote to Lowndes at the end of June, asking to be allowed to make corrections to any further edition, his reply that he expected the first impression (of five hundred) to sell out by Christmas alerted her to the scale of its success: ‘The Great World send here to Buy Evelina’, the publisher replied excitedly to ‘Mr Grafton’; ‘A polite Lady said Do, Mr Lowndes, give me Evelina, Im [sic] treated as unfashionable for not having read it.’67

  Meanwhile, the author herself sensed that although she had cleared the hurdle of her father’s discovery remarkably easily, infinite further challenges opened up ahead:

  Indeed, in the midst of the greatest satisfaction that I feel, an inward something which I cannot account for, prepares me to expect a reverse! for the more the Book is drawn into notice, the more exposed it becomes to criticism & annotations.

  […] Lord! what will all this come to? – Where will it End?68

  * * *

  * Mrs Burney did not go straight to St Martin’s Street, but to a friend’s house, via Mrs Thrale’s. Her reluctance to meet her stepdaughters casts an interesting light on relations between them. Johnson’s interpretation suggests that Fanny and her sisters’ hostility to ‘Mama’ was obvious: ‘The consolations of [Burney’s] girls must indeed be painful. She had intended to enjoy the triumph of her daughter’s superiority. They were prepared to wish them both ill, and their wishes are gratified.’15

  * Fanny mentions daggers again in an emotional letter to her brother of 4 October 1814, a reply to his refusal to assume guardianship of Fanny’s son Alex, who was facing rustication from college. At this significant juncture, she may have been trying to remind him of an old debt: ‘O Charles – you have written me a dagger!’23

  * The last chapter of Cecilia contains the words: ‘if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination.’27

  * When Burney first tried to interest Lowndes in her novel, she pointed out that the first volume included ‘a round of the most fashionable Spring Diversions of London’, and that the second volume would cover ‘Summer Diversions’.39 Since at this stage she was planning a four-volume novel, it seems reasonable to assume that she was intending to cover the whole social year season by season.

  * This anecdote appears nowhere but in Memoirs of Doctor Burney.44 In the Early Journals and Letters she simply says: ‘A thousand little incidents happened about this Time [March 1778], but I am not in a humour to recollect them: however, they were none of them productive of a discovery either to my Father or Mother.’45

  * The printed version has ‘wretch’, but my reading of the manuscript is different.

  5

  Entrance into the World

  In the summer of 1778, Hester Lynch Thrale was thirty-eight years old and expecting her twelfth child. She had already had to endure the deaths of seven children, and this last baby, Henrietta Sophia, was also destined to die very young. Mrs Thrale had been married for fifteen years to the brewer and Member of Parliament for Southwark, Henry Thrale. Though the marriage was outwardly successful, it was not happy: ‘it would have been difficult to find a bride and groom who were more temperamentally unsuited to each other’, James Clifford has written of the alliance between Thrale, the taciturn businessman, and his cultured, high-spirited Welsh heiress. Thrale displayed towards his wife few of the qualities that endeared him to his friends, one of whom, the playwright Arthur Murphy, praised his ‘goodness of heart’ and ‘amiable temper’.1 Mrs Thrale saw another side of him, coldness and neglect, and had to tolerate his many infidelities and bouts of venereal disease. In the early years of the marriage, which had been arranged by the couple’s families with no regard to the personal preferences of either party, there was little opportunity for Hester to cultivate her interest in literature, or exercise her skills as a poet and wit. Dr Johnson was to say to her later that she had lived at this period ‘like My Husband’s kept Mistress, – shut from the World, its pleasures, or its Cares’.2

  After the Thrales’ introduction to Dr Johnson in 1765, via their mutual acquaintance Murphy, an easy friendship was established. Johnson was soon a regular visitor at the brewer’s house in Southwark and comfortable estate at Streatham Park, Surrey. The Thrales were a godsend to ‘the Great Cham’, whose bluntness and acerbity did not go down well in polite society any more than did his lumbering form and unrefined, erratic manners. Howevermuch he was revered for his literary achievements, Johnson often cut a lonely and vulnerable figure. The wealthy and broad-minded Thrales, though, accommodated his oddities with ease, and a particular friendship soon grew up between the Doctor and Mrs Thrale. Something of an outsider herself, Hester Thrale provided Johnson not only with the free run of her household and ideal conditions in which he could work, but also with a degree of protection against his chronic melancholy. Shrewd and good-humoured, she was not intimidated by the great man’s ex-cathedra manner, and no doubt played on his sensibility ‘to the influence of female charms’, as Boswell rather grudgingly put it,3 once saying that she felt her power over Johnson’s spirits and his readiness to confide ‘such Secrets as [he has] entrusted to me’4 derived from her sex. Johnson needed equally a confidante and a protectress; Mrs Thrale required an outlet for her strong affections, good sense and intellect.

  The coterie of ‘Streathamites’ that grew up around Johnson’s almost permanent residence at the Thrales’ home included Garrick, Murphy, Joshua Reynolds, William Seward and James Boswell. Charles Burney had been mixing in this exalted society for about a year and a half by the time Evelina was published, but his veneration for Johnson went back much further.
He had written some rather obsequious fan mail to the great lexicographer when the Dictionary of the English Language was about to appear in the early 1750s, and visited him at the Temple in 1760, where the star-struck music-teacher surreptitiously removed some bristles from Johnson’s hearthbrush as a souvenir to take back to Norfolk, ostensibly on behalf of his friend William Bewley.* The connection was kept alive by Burney with some difficulty: Johnson’s scorn for music was well known – ‘it excites in my mind no ideas, and hinders me from contemplating my own’. Though Johnson received Burney’s books with grace and, after the publication of the second one, increasing interest, music was not a subject ever likely to elicit his full attention.

  Charles Burney’s introduction to Henry Thrale in 1776, and his subsequent engagement to teach music to the Thrales’ eldest child, Hester (always known as Queeney), created a marvellous opportunity for him to meet Johnson regularly at Streatham Park on far less unequal terms than before. The Thrales, who were generous hosts, were enjoying their most affluent period; they had already added an impressive new library wing to the house, and in 1777 they had a small lake with an island built in the grounds and reconstructed a two-mile gravel walk around the property. The household’s prospects seemed fair in every way (although the unpredictability of Thrale’s profits from his brewery in fact made their finances quite volatile), and Burney was intensely gratified by the chance to share something of their luxurious and easy lifestyle.