Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  Fanny prepared a statement about her wish to leave Court for the Queen, but lacked the nerve to hand it in. It seemed that the only people not to have noticed her condition were the Queen and Mrs Schwellenberg; elsewhere ‘there seemed about my little person a universal commotion’.72 The Warren Hastings trial, which she attended at least seven times that year, brought her into contact with a number of her friends, who were appalled at how haggard she was looking, and the effects of her ‘seclusion from the world’ had even attracted the attention of the press, who ‘dealt round comments and lamentations profusely’.73 Fanny was fading dramatically, displaying psychosomatically-enhanced symptoms of a cough, breathlessness, fever and weight-loss that were redolent of both consumption and a wasting disease, such as anorexia nervosa. Like Mrs Thrale with her desperate formula, ‘Death or Piozzi!’, Fanny had set up a dangerous bargain with herself: ‘resignation of place or of life was the only remaining alternative’.74

  Mrs Thrale herself (now Mrs Piozzi) was back in England and enjoying the success of her new career as an author (she had published four books between 1785 and 1789, including her Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson LL.D, which led the field in Johnsoniana). She heard the rumours about Fanny’s sufferings, but was unconvinced by them: ‘my Notion always was that her Majesty confided in, & loved the little cunning Creature as I did: while She, to cover her real Consequence at Court, pretended disgust & weariness among her friends.’75 Mrs Piozzi was clearly much more embittered towards her than Fanny could have guessed: when they met by accident, at Norbury Park in the late 1780s and at St George’s Chapel, Windsor in 1790, the older woman was polite but distant. (The latter was the occasion when the Queen made Fanny cringe by asking, ‘Who was that painted foreigner?’) Mrs Piozzi could be as powerful an enemy as she had once been a friend, and her view of Fanny’s attachment to the Queen was distinctly uncharitable: ‘no one possesses more powers of pleasing than She does, no one can be more self-interested, & of course more willing to employ those Powers for her own, and her Family’s Benefit’.76

  It took Fanny seven months to propose her resignation to the Queen, but the Queen was unconvinced of any necessity and simply let the matter rest. Fanny relapsed despairingly, taking hartshorn, opium and Dr Willis’s (unspecified) ‘violent’ medicines to relieve her debilitating symptoms: ‘so weak and faint I was become, that I was compelled to put my head out into the air, at all hours and in all weathers, from time to time, to recover the power of breathing, which seemed not seldom almost withdrawn.’77

  It was during this dreadful year that Fanny returned to the composition of her tragedy Edwy and Elgiva, finding dismal solace in the plight of her murdered heroine. She did not harbour any ambitions for this ‘almost spontaneous’ work78 – in fact she wasn’t sure it was a ‘work’ at all – but she finished a first draft in August and went straight on to start another play in the same vein. By June 1791 she had three tragedies half-written and a fourth begun: ‘I could go on with nothing; I could only suggest and invent’, she wrote in her journal, indicating how restless and obsessive this spurt of composition actually was:

  The power of composition has to me indeed proved a solace, a blessing! When incapable of all else, that, unsolicited, unthought of, has presented itself to my solitary leisure, and beguiled me of myself.79

  Fanny Burney’s ‘Court plays’, which were not published until 1995, have little claim to literary or dramatic merit but have attracted critical attention on account of their vivid symbolism and the clues they offer to their author’s subconscious feelings. There is no evidence that at the time of writing Fanny intended them to be staged or printed; in their early drafts they could perhaps be better described as effusions than dramas, disparate fragments of blank verse that the author had organised into a familiar form. Like Crisp’s Virginia, these are plays that favour speech over action. The climax of Edwy and Elgiva, for example, is reported rather than seen on stage: ‘’Twas horrible! – the cries of Elgiva,/ Torn from her home and husband, rent the Heavens’, Sigebert says of the heroine’s abduction. ‘Who could have viewed unpitying her despair?’80 Certainly not the audience, from whom it is hidden. In the same play, there are no fewer than twenty-three scenes in the fifth act, all taking place in the same unspecified ‘forest’. Indeed, in the composition of these plays, Fanny seems to have forgotten everything she ever knew about dramatic structure and the writing of blank verse – consistently bad in each – and to have given herself over to her ‘fits’ of composition as she might to a drug. She made the analogy of possession clear in a diary entry for May 1791 that speaks of the works themselves as having the power of composition, as if she experienced them as incubi rather than as inspirations: ‘[they] seize me capriciously; but I never reprove them; I give the play into their own direction, & am sufficiently thankful, in this wearing waste of existence, for being so seized at all’.81

  The tragic dramas are all set in the distant past and share very similar themes: civil strife, the constraint of women, filial duty and sacrificial marriage. Edwy and Elgiva and The Siege of Pevensey made use of historical subjects adapted from Hume’s History of England, the former tapping into the late-eighteenth-century nationalist vogue for the Anglo-Saxon period. Hubert de Vere (‘a pastoral tragedy’) and the fragmentary Elberta were Gothic romances which the author may have wished to dignify by setting in the thirteenth and eleventh centuries respectively. Each play features a heroine who quickly falls victim to the political and sexual power-struggles of the men around her, and each contains a malign authoritarian as agent provocateur and a weak or prevaricating ‘protector’ figure whose shortcomings expose the heroine to danger and, in all but the case of Adela in The Siege of Pevensey, death. The repeated themes of constraint, monasticism and forced marriage are fairly obviously metaphors for Court life and the impositions it laid on Fanny’s personal and creative liberty. Her passively suffering heroines face the same choice between death or submission that she had come to see as the stark reality of her own situation.

  Margaret Anne Doody, in her exhaustive psychological interpretation of the tragedies,82 has found in them evidence of violent resentments towards George Cambridge, Stephen Digby and, most of all, Charles Burney, the ‘protector’ who had failed to protect or rescue, whose alterego de Mowbray in Hubert de Vere is his own daughter’s murderer. The question of ‘protection’ is an interesting one, since the dutifully self-sacrificial daughters in these plays all end up, in a reversal of natural law, protecting their fathers’ feelings, honour or lives (again, this is reminiscent of Crisp’s Virginia, the manuscript of which Fanny had inherited). In The Siege of Pevensey, Adela’s father is so sensitive to the violence a forced marriage between her and de Warenne would entail that she volunteers to enter a convent to save him from the temptation to commit suicide. Far from asking ‘permission to rebel’, the women in these tragedies accept their fate – which is to be badly protected, or not protected at all, by someone less capable or less responsible than themselves.

  The language of the plays encourages psychoanalytical interpretations; at times it resembles confessional, or even ‘automatic’ writing. Here is Dunstan in Edwy and Elgiva in the scene following the plot’s (invisible) climax:

  I feel petrified! – My King! – rash Youth,

  Why would he thus provoke – What are these men?

  They shrink – they know – or fear me – Hah! a Corpse

  Perhaps ’tis Elgiva – yes ’tis ev’n so!

  Her lifeless frame – that deed is surely done.83

  And here Elgiva, in the draft of a sub-Shakespearean lament over her forced divorce from Edwy:

  The Song of Joy let Treach’ry Sing

  Vice is now to Mirth inclin’d,

  Bring me Myrtle, Lawrels bring,

  Bind their Brows, their Tresses bind.

  Hark I hear of Death the knell; –

  Hist! of Ghosts I hear the Yell

  Murmuring in the Swelling Wind.84

&n
bsp; The state of distraction which the author may be trying to convey in these characters’ speeches is out of her control; she is too distracted herself to write it. Doody thinks that the plays reveal ‘a truly suicidal streak’ in their author, immured in a Court that had come to resemble an asylum for the insane, and speculates that Burney may have really feared going mad herself. There is certainly an air of desperation about these pieces, an artistic letting-go, as if Fanny was daring herself to see what would happen. Her distressed and dying heroines are abandoned in a variety of graveyards, dense forests or wildernesses, physically or mentally wounded, waiting for ‘the doom of death’ with ‘swelling bosoms’ panting for ‘some finer, lighter, purer region’.85 They are also, more completely, ‘abandoned’ in their inflated language and nightmare visions. Fanny seems to have anticipated the worst excesses of the coming vogues for ‘Gothic’ and Romanticism.

  Her misgivings about her tragedies were obvious from the start. ‘Believe me, my dear friends,’ she wrote to Susan and Mrs Locke only months after leaving Court, ‘in the present composed & happy state of my mind, I could never have suggested these Tales of Woe; – but having only to connect, combine, contract, & finish, I will not leave them undone.’86 It was perhaps an unfortunate instinct. Though her tragedies were never going to be viable commercially (unlike her comedies), Fanny seems to have valued them because they were written in extremis. In her later novels she adopted much the same style for the episodes of high drama, and it worked no better there, but it is clear that ‘spontaneous’ writing, uncontrolled and empty though it was, struck her as somehow truthful to strong feeling.

  The Court plays may have performed a valuable function by letting Fanny dwell on the fantasy of suicidal sacrificial death without actually having to go through with it. Even in her worst period of physical debilitation, she displayed a strong instinct for self-preservation and surprising will-power. When the Queen offered her a holiday instead of retirement, she refused, incurring temporary displeasure of the sort she wouldn’t have dared weather before. Elsewhere, opinion was moving strongly in sympathy with the ailing Second Keeper. The subject had become prime gossip among the London intelligentsia, and was flamboyantly indulged by James Boswell when he turned up at Windsor one Sunday in October 1790 to beg for a look at Fanny’s correspondence from Dr Johnson for his forthcoming biography (which she refused). William Windham, who was marshalling members of The Club to petition Dr Burney on the subject, said that Fanny’s release from Court had become ‘the common cause of every one interested in the concerns of genius & literature’,87 a recognition of how highly regarded Miss Burney’s achievements really were in the outside world.

  Of course, the agitations of Oppositionists like Windham were dangerously open to misinterpretation, but fortunately there was not time for the matter to become overtly political; Fanny’s resignation was gradually accepted by the Queen, and after many delays and setbacks she was released from duty on 7 July 1791, almost five years to the day since she had entered the castle with such fear and trembling. ‘My Heart was a little sad, in spite of its full contentment’, Fanny wrote to Susan when she arrived at Chelsea College, but she soon began to revive.

  Her father had set up a desk for her in his study (now called the Grubbery), which he was prepared, for the first time ever, to share. With his great task of the History of Music completed (the third and fourth volumes came out together in 1789), some of the urgency had gone out of the Doctor’s work habits and he was happy to have a companion with whom to read, work and compare progress. There was no talk of Fanny becoming his amanuensis again – Sarah had inherited that function for a time, and the Doctor had paid help too when he needed it. But the apartment at Chelsea College was not very large, and a certain claustrophobia must have struck them all at the start of the new arrangement. Fanny and her half-sister Sarah – aged thirty-nine and nineteen respectively – had nothing in common except a desire for solitude in which to read and write; now they had to share a bedroom. What Mrs Burney thought of the unexpected readmission of her stepdaughter into her household is not recorded.

  * * *

  * It is a thousand pages long.

  * Joyce Hemlow extrapolates from Susan’s remark that Dick was ‘involved in misdemeanours and difficulties’.36 Her further suggestion that the dissolute younger brother Lionel Tyrold in Camilla is based on Dick Burney is taken up by the editors of the Early Journal and Letters, who state as if fact that Dick ‘was exiled to India, probably because of libidinous conduct which may have led to resultant victimization by blackmailing and debts’.37 As the editor of Sarah’s letters, Lorna J. Clark, points out, there is no evidence to support this surmise, or the identification of Dick with Lionel Tyrold.38

  † Presumably Dick witheld the information from home for some time: Susan Burney’s reaction to the news in her journal is dated June 1789.

  * Dick Burney’s monument in the Mission Burial Ground, Park Street, Calcutta, says he ‘eminently exhibited the characteristics of an enlightened tutor and a spiritual guide’. Whatever his ‘transgressions’, they seem to have been overcome very early on. By 1790, his mother was gushingly thanking his friends Mr and Mrs Charles Grant for having ‘recovered my son’,44 and correspondence between Dick and his parents is mentioned at intervals on the family grapevine.

  10

  Taking Sides

  When Fanny Burney left Court in the summer of 1791 with a pension of £100 a year, she was a mature and independent woman emerging, as it were for the first time, into a changed and changing society. In this year of the first publication of The Rights of Man, between the fall of the Bastille and the onset of the Terror, there was much more widespread tolerance of radical ideas among the English intelligentsia than Fanny could have imagined from within the walls of Windsor Castle. Some of the Burneys’ acquaintances had become out-and-out republicans, among them the poet William Mason, Mary Gwynn* and the scholar Catherine Macaulay. James Burney had shocked his father with his ‘Painism’, Charles Burney junior had become a close friend of William Windham and the Whig Lord Spencer, and now Susan seemed to be following their lead, and that of William and Fredy Locke, with an ardour for democracy that posed a great challenge to her conservative sister. Fanny had jokingly referred to ‘you Republicans of Norbury & Mickleham!’1 in a letter to Susan written while she was touring the West Country with Mrs Ord in August 1791, but Susan did not take the remark lightly, and it provoked a series of exchanges which show the sisters for the first time in profound disagreement. ‘France is doubtless at present in a state of confusion & anarchy wch is grievous’, Susan wrote, in uncharacteristically sombre vein:

  – à tel pris I cd not have wished for any revolution – but since it has been effected, I wish its support & success from a persuasion that whatever disturbance or distress it May have occasioned a few living Individuals … Millions yet unborn, & Millions who still exist will be lastingly benefited – that abuses very intolerable & very shocking to humanity will no longer be tolerated – that the great Mass of the French nation (wch does not consist in Dukes & Counts) will be relieved from oppressions cruel towards the sufferers & disgraceful to the great Aristocrates by whom they have been inflicted.2

  These surprisingly teleological sentiments were triggered by Fanny’s account of a group of French aristocrat refugees she and Mrs Ord had met at an inn in Winchester. The plight of the ‘Poor Wanderers’ horrified Fanny: ‘is THIS LIBERTY! – where one side alone predominates thus fiercely? […] alas – in France, it seems to me but a change of despotism’.3 ‘What Tyranny’, Susan answered, ‘does there appear in the new Code of Laws? – What Tyranny has the National Assembly sanctioned?’ though she had to concede misgivings over the new assembly, ‘wch seems to me to consist of a very VERY inferiour set of Men, who by their republican & insolent spirit will I fear endanger the new Constitution more than all the efforts of the aristocratic body’.4 It was disturbing for Fanny to hear these set and earnest opinions from the ‘si
ster of her soul’. As a believer in absolutes, she could not account for ‘wrong’ ideas taking root in ‘bosoms so pure as my Susan’s & Mr & Mrs Lock’s’: ‘My Mind revolts at differing essentially from the THREE MINDS I most revere’.5

  The Revolution in France was ‘the only topic which those who had either hearts or heads could, at that time, discuss’,6 its increasing militancy observed and debated in obsessive detail by the English intellectual class. Fanny records long conversations on the subject with Windham and with Edmund Burke, the publication of whose Reflections on the Revolution in France the previous year had led to a renewal of their acquaintance. ‘Kings are necessary,’ he told her, in his pragmatic new spirit of reaction, ‘& if we would preserve peace & prosperity, we must preserve THEM.’7 The likelihood of the Bourbons adapting to constitutional monarchy was not great, however: when Louis XVI was forced to swear his continuing allegiance to the Constitution or don a red ‘liberty’ cap to please the crowd, it was as a gesture of humiliation, not a foretaste of reform.

  When she was visiting Arthur Young and his wife in Suffolk in the autumn of 1792 Fanny met a distinguished refugee from France, the Duc de Liancourt, who impressed her with the story of his dramatic escape from France in an open boat. There had been a price on the Duc’s head since his attempt to rouse his regiment in support of Louis XVI following the massacre of royal guards and attendants in the Tuileries on 10 August 1792. At almost exactly the same time, another group of Constitutionalist refugees intimately bound up with the events of 10 August were arriving in Susan Phillips’s neighbourhood in Surrey: the Princesse d’Hénin and her lover the Comte de Lally-Tolendal took a house in Richmond, the Princesse de Broglie was staying in West Humble and a group including Madame de Châtre, Matthieu de Montmorency and the charismatic ex-Minister of War Louis de Narbonne (purportedly a natural son of Louis XV) had rented Juniper Hall, a large house in a damp valley at the foot of Box Hill, about three quarters of a mile out of Mickleham village.