Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  During the courtship, the atmosphere at Chelsea College was strained. Mrs Burney was at her most ‘capricious’ and seemed to Fanny to be trying to catch her out by ostentatiously leaving the room almost every time Monsieur d’Arblay called. Only by forcing Sarah to stay put could Fanny thwart ‘the confounding & detecting effect’ she assumed was ‘meant to be produced & pointed out by la Dama’. The implication that ‘la Dama’ was an old hand at intrigue and assignations herself would not have been lost on Susan, the recipient of this report, nor would the unpleasant observation that Sarah Burney’s interest in Monsieur d’Arblay’s visits seemed to be one of ‘watchful malice’.53 Charles Burney himself was infected with this spirit of ill-will, and drew up a list of the factions in France (including the Constitutionalists) for d’Arblay to define, with the enquiry if there were any more. The sarcasm of this did not reach d’Arblay, but was absorbed by Fanny, the go-between, who also had to invent thanks from her father to her lover for his earnest efforts.

  Susan remained Fanny’s mainstay at this extraordinary time, reading both sides of the lovers’ correspondence (copied for her by Fanny) and entering fully into the spirit of conspiracy. It was an odd situation in which Susan was not just letter-bearer, letter-reader and general go-between but substitute fiancée too, having her hand kissed and listening to the outpourings of the frustrated Chevalier. ‘Is it possible my dearest Susan can talk of postage to me at such a time?’ Fanny wrote with true lover’s impatience, ‘when you have only time for one Line, send it me off, as you prize my peace.’54

  D’Arblay’s duty to Narbonne meant that his fate was tied up with that of a very active, ambitious and influential man who might at any moment draw them both back into war or intrigue. The defection of General Dumouriez to the Austrians at the beginning of April had quashed Narbonne’s latest plan to join a proposed counter-revolutionary movement, but there were to be dozens of similar alarms. Exile in Surrey had made the émigrés look like people of leisure; Fanny was having to consider for the first time what it might be like to be married to a soldier, and one of the wrong nationality. D’Arblay’s remarks about how much cheaper life was in France raised the question also of where they might end up living.

  D’Arblay was not, for all his charm, a practical or resourceful man. His enthusiasm for a succession of money-spinning schemes flared up and died down unpredictably. Probably his wildest dream, and one of the longest-cherished in the spring of 1793, was that the widowed French Queen Marie Antionette might – with a change of government! – be once again in a position to grant pensions to worthy candidates, amongst whom he counted himself, naturally. He came to speak of this money as if it were only a matter of time before it would be in his hands. Fanny did not seem to be worried about d’Arblay’s lack of realism, possibly because she was already inwardly confident of being able to support them both by her writing. What did give her cause for concern were the outbursts of emotionalism she witnessed in d’Arblay. On one occasion he became quite maudlin about the Locke girls’ measles, and warned Fanny that he was sometimes ‘moody […] throwing myself here, there and everywhere restlessly’.55 She became too agitated to remember later exactly what else he had said, writing, ‘I am frightened at the susceptibility that binds me – perhaps more than any other thing – to enter into all his feelings!’56 It is interesting not only that her phenomenal memory shut down at this point, but that she saw the danger of her own sensibilities being altered by sympathy with his.

  With the departure of Madame de Staël at the end of May (called back to her husband and their property at Coppet, near Lausanne), the Juniper Hall party was breaking up. Having found no prominent position in England, Narbonne intended to leave as soon as was practical, but understanding that something was afoot, he made no demands on d’Arblay to accompany him. D’Arblay himself seemed to have all but given up job-hunting by the summer. His conversation was mostly about cottages and he seemed eager to embrace a life of retirement. Loyal lieutenancy had always been his strong suit; he had done it for Lafayette and Narbonne. Now he imagined a cosy domestic version of the same thing, perhaps undertaking a little light secretarial work for his famous wife (he had extraordinarily neat handwriting) or making a French translation of her next book – the one whose proceeds they would live on. What could be more romantic than love in a cottage with a writer of romances, or more satisfyingly philosophical in an age of revolution than simply sitting tight and cultivating one’s garden, à la Candide?

  A rapid and successful return to authorship was clearly the only way ahead for Fanny, but she needed some peace in which to test out ideas for a new book. Mickleham was out of the question while Madame de Staël was still there, issuing invitations to the last. The best place to ensure privacy was the old ‘homely home’, Chesington, and Fanny went there at the end of May with some notes for a novel. The house was sadly run-down, but ‘my good little dumpty fat square short round Mrs Hamilton’ was just as kindly welcoming as ever, as of course was ‘her young niece, Miss Kitty, who is only 63’.57 James Burney was there too, trying to recover from the long illness and subsequent death in April of his eldest child, seven-year-old Catherine. To Fanny he looked ten years older and ‘grievously altered’ by the blow. There is no mention of his wife Sally or four-year-old son Martin, but James often went about on his own. Fanny remarked that he was so often at Chelsea College he ‘almost lives’ there,58 and since 1787 he had been making surprise visits to the Phillipses at Mickleham, apparently looking round the area for a house to rent. Much of his erratic behaviour and some of his remarks on those occasions indicated that all was not well with his marriage, even in those early days. Susan hoped that ‘all that might have made [James and his wife] mutually wretched’ had been overcome and that ‘every year will endear them to each other’,59 but there were worse disruptions to come.

  The new book that Fanny felt pressured to write was doomed to be something of a compromise. She said later* that Camilla was based on jottings made during her time at Windsor – hardly her happiest or most productive period. The sense that she was using this book to ingratiate herself with the Royal Family is evident in the fulsome dedication to the Queen, an honour that Fanny solicited (unlike Jane Austen, who kicked against having to dedicate Emma to the Prince Regent twenty years later). The book thus had several burdens to bear before a page had been written.

  Work was interrupted in May by a visit from d’Arblay, for which preparations began days in advance:

  Mrs Hamilton ordered half a Ham to be boiled ready; – & Miss Kitty trimmed up her best Cap, – & tried it on, on Saturday, to get it in shape to her face. She made Chocolate also, – which we drank up on Monday & Tuesday, because it was spoiling: – ‘I have never seen none of the French Quality,’ she says, ‘and I have a purdigious Curosity [sic]; though as to Dukes and Dukes Sons, and these high top Captains, I know they’ll think me a mere country Bumpkin. Howsever, they can’t call me worse than Fat Kit Square, and that’s the worst name I ever got from any of our english polite Bears.’60

  Despite the cap and the chocolate, Monsieur d’Arblay’s arrival still took them by surprise:

  the French top Captain entered while poor Miss Kitty was in dishbill! [déshabille] & Mrs Hamilton finishing washing up her China from Breakfast! A Maid who was out at the Pump, first saw the arrival, ran in to give Miss Kitty time to escape – for she was in her round dress nightcap, & without her roll and curls – However, he followed too quick – & Mrs Hamilton was seen in her linen gown & mob, though she had put on a silk one in expectation, for every noon these 4 or 5 days past – & Miss Kitty was in such confusion she hurried out of the Room. She soon, however, returned with the roll and curls, & the Forehead & Throat fashionably lost, in a silk Gown.61

  With roll and curls firmly in place, Kitty Cooke and Mrs Hamilton never left the room during the whole visit, much to d’Arblay’s chagrin. They were immensely impressed by the French ‘top Captain’ and his history of war, revolution and e
scape. Quizzing Fanny later about him, Mrs Hamilton was moved to tears. It was only now that she’d actually set eyes on one of the émigré gentry, she said, that she could really begin to believe there had been a Revolution after all! To which Miss Kitty agreed: ‘“I purtest I did not know before but it was all a Sham!”’62

  Fanny harboured few illusions over d’Arblay’s chances of employment. She also realised that matters in France could take a whole generation to be sorted out, and that his property there should be discounted from their plans. But this hard-headed realism balked before the power of her desire to go ahead and marry the indigent Frenchman come what may. As a middle-aged spinster daughter Fanny was still prey to her family’s plans for her, the latest of which was that she should go and live as companion to Charlotte, who had been left with the care of three very young children at the death of her husband, Clement Francis, in 1792. Marriage would mean a final release from such threats of dependence, escape from Chelsea College and, at last, a share in Susan’s apparently charmed life at Mickleham. ‘You all MUST know’, she wrote to Susan and the Lockes with emotion, ‘that to ME a crust of Bread, with a little Roof for shelter, & a FIRE for warmth, NEAR YOU, would bring me to peace, to happiness – to all that my Heart holds dear, or ever, in any situation, could prize.’63

  Once Madame de Staël had left Juniper Hall the place all but shut down, and Narbonne and d’Arblay took to dining every day at the Phillipses’ cottage, much to Captain Phillips’s annoyance. He had his own view of the relationship between his wife and the foreign gentlemen, and it was not charitable. The property he had inherited at Belcotton in County Louth, which was vulnerable to the maraudings of nationalist rebels, took him off to Ireland frequently, but every time he came back it must have seemed as if his wife had perversely strengthened the already unwelcome intimacy with the Juniperians. D’Arblay especially, with his almost constant visits, his petting of the children and relish for lachrymose tête-à-têtes with Susan, was obviously not to be trusted.

  Discussion of the income problem exercised all Fanny’s and d’Arblay’s friends at Mickleham, but only Susan saw that the solution lay with Fanny: ‘print, print, print!’ she urged. ‘Here is a ressource – a certainty of removing present difficulties’. ‘Yes, I would’, Fanny replied, ‘– if my own Mistress – & either for myself, or by – even by subscription’.64 By ‘for myself’ she meant at her own expense, which would be out of the question if she married d’Arblay. To publish by subscription meant opening a list and soliciting funds in advance, as her father had done for his History of Music. Though Fanny did not relish such a method of publication, any chance to make cash quickly was not to be sneered at any longer. Narbonne had thoroughly alarmed d’Arblay by exclaiming that the life the couple envisaged together would kill Fanny. If she was so delicate that she could not defy public opinion over Madame de Staël, he noted – with a touch of resentment – what hope of her surviving the social and material deprivations of life ‘comme – des Paysans!’?65 And how would they support their children? It was the first time anyone had broached that problem. Fanny and d’Arblay had idealised the struggle with poverty as a lovers’ trial, but at forty-one, Fanny was still young enough to have quite a sizeable family. Had not La Dama surprised them all by giving birth to Dick at the age of forty-three and Sarah at forty-seven?

  Fanny tried to heal the rift with her father by showing him the few pages of her new novel, whose heroine at this date laboured under the name ‘Betulia’. He was pleased, with the writing and with the gesture, but nothing was going to alter significantly his dim view of Monsieur d’Arblay. He withheld his consent when d’Arblay formally applied for it, citing the ‘precarious tenure’ of his daughter’s income, his own professed inability to help them financially, ‘the distracted state of your own country, and the almost hopeless state of your party & friends’. To Locke he replied at greater length and in sad agitation: ‘All the self-denying virtues of Epictetus will not keep off indigence in a state of society, without the assistance of patrimony, profession, or possessions of [sic] on one side or the other.’ No one was better qualified than Dr Burney to know what a struggle it could be to maintain ‘a family establishment’ from scratch, but perhaps he had been too good an example of the triumphantly self-made man to impress his daughter with anything other than her own ability to succeed likewise.

  The way in which Fanny was writing to d’Arblay indicates that parental approval was not, by this stage, uppermost in her thoughts:

  You desire to know if I have weighed well how I could support an entirely retired life, &c –

  Here comes a great YES! I have considered it thoroughly – but it was not at Ches[ington] – No; I considered it upon receiving your first Letter [31 March]; & my thoughts have never since varied.

  Situation, I well know, is wholly powerless to render me either happy or miserable. My peace of mind, my chearfulness of spirits, my every chance of felicity, rest totally & solely upon enjoying the society, the confidence, & the kindness of those I esteem & love. These, I am convinced, will at all times be successful; – every thing else has at all times failed.66

  It is not surprising that d’Arblay found this letter ‘charmante’, showing as it does Fanny’s ardour, good humour and commitment. On 21 June she left London for Epsom, where she was going to meet the Lockes at Bracebridge’s Inn and be taken on to Norbury Park. It was presented to Dr and Mrs Burney as yet another visit, but this time Fanny had no intention of coming home.

  A begging letter from Susan, the family’s darling, made Dr Burney submit to the inevitable and send a grudging consent (presumably an upsetting document – it was not kept), and at seven a.m. on 28 July 1793 Fanny and her ‘bien meilleur Ami’ were married at St Michael’s Church, Mickleham. It was a small party: Susan and Captain Phillips, the Lockes, ‘Narbonne and James Burney, who stood in for his father and gave away the bride. Two days later the couple went through a Roman Catholic ceremony at the Sardinian Chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a precaution against any future property disputes in France, then went back to Mickleham to start their married life in modest rented rooms in a farmhouse on Blagden Hill.

  * * *

  * Goldsmith’s ‘Jessamy Bride’, formerly Miss Horneck and wife to one of the equerries at Court.

  * Joyce Hemlow suggests that Fanny had taught herself French as early as 1764,19 and it is clear – to take only one example – from her exchanges with the refugees in Winchester, as detailed in the diary of August 1791, that she understood French with great ease.

  * She was answering a query by the King, quoted in a letter to Charles Burney of 5–6 July 1796, after the book was published.

  11

  The Cabbage-Eaters

  The reaction to Fanny’s marriage was almost universally one of surprise. Mrs Burney alone said she had seen it coming; other members of the family who had been kept out of the secret, such as Maria Rishton, isolated in Norfolk by her misanthropic husband, were amazed and amused at the prospect of ‘our vestal sister’ taking such a plunge in middle age.1 Some friends of the family, such as Mrs Ord and James Hutton, were appalled, but Fanny no longer worried about their disapproval. ‘I fear my good old friend Mr Hutton imagines me a mere poor miserable Dupe, taken in by an artful French avanturier,’ she wrote with spirit to her stepmother. ‘If he thinks so, it is he, – Heaven be praised! – is the Dupe! – which I bear with great philosophy, if one of us must be Dupe’.2

  The d’Arblays’ wedding present from William and Fredy Locke was the lease of a five-acre plot of land on the Norbury Park estate, on which the newlyweds intended to build themselves a house. D’Arblay drew up some elaborate plans in his exceedingly neat hand, but the project didn’t begin for years due to lack of cash. ‘How the matter will terminate I know not’, Fanny wrote to her father in the summer of 1793 as she listened to the builder pouring cold water on d’Arblay’s amateur architecture; ‘at present the contest is lively, & M. d’Arblay’s want of language, & the m
an’s want of ideas, render it, to me, extremely diverting’.3 Everything was ‘extremely diverting’ to the enraptured bride, even not having a home of her own. The couple were conspicuously and besottedly in love.

  After four months at Phenice Farm on Blagden Hill, the d’Arblays found much more private lodgings in a cottage on the main street in Great Bookham called ‘Fair Field’ (which they renamed ‘The Hermitage’). They lived in this cramped but cosy house for the next four years, with their few prized possessions, such as the copy of Van Dyke’s Sacharissa in oils by Mrs Delany and Edward Burney’s portrait of Samuel Crisp, some cheap cane furniture and spare household goods lent by the Lockes and Phillipses. ‘Can Life, [Monsieur d’Arblay] often says, be more innocent than ours? or happiness more inoffensive?’

  – he works in his Garden, or studies English or Mathematicks, while I write, – when I work at my needle he reads to me, & we enjoy the beautiful Country around us, in long & romantic strolls, during which he carries under his arm a portable walking Chair, lent us by Mr Lock, that I may rest as I proceed.4

  Even in the early days, there were threats to this life of quiet retirement, for d’Arblay’s honour and inclination made him want to respond to developments such as the gathering of monarchists in Toulon in 1793, routed in December by the forces of the Convention under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte. Some of d’Arblay’s friends had decided to risk the return to France to retrieve property or rejoin family; he himself had hardly any family left except a surviving younger brother, François, and a beloved uncle in Joigny.* The desire to make contact with his remaining kin must have been strong, as was the desire not to lose touch with his friends and the Constitutionalist cause for which they had risked so much. Fanny did not interfere in these matters of conscience and duty, but dreaded a rekindling of her husband’s ‘military ardour’.6 Everything they heard about life under the Terror in France and everything they read in the papers (received second-hand from the Lockes and the parson) was alarming, and lent weight to Fanny’s belief that a return to France would mean certain death for d’Arblay. French visitors passing through Bookham had dramatic and pathetic tales to relate. The Chevalier de Beaumetz, an associate of Talleyrand, told the d’Arblays of his flight from murderous agents of the Convention and his narrow escape by hiding himself under a pile of rubbish in an attic. Fanny retold his story in gripping ‘thriller’ style in a letter to her father,7 revelling in its intrinsic drama: ‘as the Gang approached, higher & higher, nearer & nearer, he heard a woman exclaiming “O, you’ll find him – I’m sure he’s in the House.”’