Fanny made a surprising return to print in the first winter of her married life, her first publication for eleven years, with a pamphlet called Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy. This cause had been taken up by a committee of charitable ladies (with Dr Burney acting as secretary) and had already been the subject of pamphlets by Burke and Hannah More and a poem, ‘The Emigrants’, by Charlotte Smith. Fanny’s appeal to ‘the Ladies of Great Britain’ to send money to support the refugee priests was a mixture of conventional morality and sensationalism. She described (on what authority we may wonder) the 1792 massacre of priests in the Église des Carmes thus:
the murderers dart after them: the pious suppliants kneel – but they rise no more! they pray – and their prayers ascend to heaven, unheard on earth! Groans resound through the vaulted roof – Mangled carcases strew the consecrated ground – derided, while wounded; insulted, while slaughtered – they are cleft in twain – their savage destroyers joy in their cries – Blood, agony, and death close the fatal scene!8
Charles Burney, significantly, loved this rhetoric: ‘I never liked anything of your precious writing more’, he wrote to the author in congratulation. His praise was enough to encourage Fanny to develop the style for other grand subjects – sometimes more appropriately than others.
Brief Reflections is interesting for its clear statement, in the ‘Apology’, of Fanny’s views on the role of women. If she had read Mary Wollstonecraft’s extraordinary feminist polemic of the previous year, Vindication of the Rights of Women, she does not mention the fact in her extant letters or journals. It is highly likely that she avoided the book, or read only enough to condemn it, as she had done other ‘dangerous’ literature in the past, such as Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. Wollstonecraft’s acute analysis of female conditioning and subjugation was indeed so radical that it was relatively easy, at this date, to dismiss it as Jacobin ranting; but even women writers, like Fanny Burney, who did not want to dignify Wollstonecraft’s work by engaging with it directly, can be seen to be reacting to it, reaffirming their own ideas or formulating them perhaps for the first time. Fanny’s position, as set out in the ‘Apology’, seems at first sight to be a restatement of received wisdom about ‘the distinct ties of [women’s] prescriptive duties’ to the home and their unsuitability for ‘forming public characters’ (rather rich coming from ‘the author of Evelina and Cecilia’, as she identified herself on the title page), but she was assertive about the superior role that women had to play within their restricted field. They should not be ‘mere passive spectatresses’ of life, but active in the refinement and practice of morality,
since the retirement, which divests them of practical skill for public purposes, guards them, at the same time, from the heart-hardening effects of general worldly commerce. It gives them leisure to reflect and to refine, not merely upon the virtues, but the pleasures of benevolence; not only and abstractedly upon that sense of good and evil which is implanted in all, but feelingly, nay awefully, upon the woes they see, yet are spared!9
This was as unlike Wollstonecraft as it was unlike Wollstonecraft’s opponent Hannah More (who famously said of the idea of ‘Rights’, ‘there is perhaps no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behaviour as woman’10). Fanny’s was an egalitarian view of sorts, if prescriptive: women were the conscience of society, men its functionaries. She was basically claiming all the moral high ground for her sex in return for any ‘heart-hardening’ participation in ‘worldly commerce’, which would contaminate women, on whom private virtue and social progress depended. Fanny Burney was making over ‘conduct-book’-style ideas from the old century for use by a new generation to whom James Fordyce and his kind looked impossibly old-fashioned. It was reactionary but assertive, and actually had a greater immediate impact on the coming age than did Wollstonecraft, whose time was yet to come. In Burney’s post-1790s novels, her tragedies and her one political tract, all of which promote the idea of moral responsibility as a more powerful weapon for women than political rights, we can see the emergence of the ‘Victorian’ ideal of womanhood that in fact took hold well in advance of Victoria’s reign, and which found its most famous expression in the idea of ‘the Angel in the House’.
Married life at Bookham was blissfully happy and amusing. Monsieur d’Arblay made strenuous efforts to cultiver son jardin, hoping that enthusiasm would make up for ignorance. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell weeds from vegetables, and dug up a whole asparagus bed; he also planted strawberries thinking they would crop the first year: ‘our Garden, therefore, is not yet quite the most profitable thing in the World’, Fanny wrote to her father, ‘but M.[onsieur] assures me it is to be the staff of our Table & existence’.11 D’Arblay’s passion for redesigning and transplanting threatened at one point to wipe out all signs of life in The Hermitage’s little plot and orchard, neither of which ever seemed to impress visitors quite as much as he felt they deserved. Fanny was appreciative, though, and patient with his mistakes. She enjoyed watching him trying to cut the hedges with martial swipes from his sabre and giving wheelbarrow rides to Susan’s two-year-old son William. Her own attempts at cooking had been disasters, and they soon got a maid to do it. Some ‘asparagrass, most fortunately overlooked by my Weeder’ was sent to Chelsea as humorous acknowledgement of their incompetence, but one crop did survive to grace the d’Arblays’ own table: cabbages, of which they had a glut in the spring of 1794 because they didn’t identify them early enough. They ate cabbage for a week with more voluptuous pleasure than is easily imaginable, exulting in self-sufficient pride and joy: ‘O, you have no idea how sweet they tasted! we agreed they had a freshness & a goût we had never met with before.’12
During the summer of 1794, Fanny suffered ‘bilious attacks’ and fatigue which neither she nor her doctor recognised as symptoms related to early pregnancy. The medical man ‘gave no opinion’ even when he examined his patient in the middle of June, when Fanny could have been as much as thirteen weeks pregnant; for her part, she was either ignorant of the symptoms (which is unlikely, given her closeness to her sisters) or used to such irregular periods that missing three of them did not surprise her. This dysmenorrhea (a condition associated with anorexics and of course, more generally, with the menopause) might help explain some of her mysterious chronic ailments, fevers and prostrations during the preceding years.
Monsieur d’Arblay was delighted at the news when it was finally confirmed, though, like Fanny, fearful for her well-being. Dr Burney was delighted too; he had more than made up the breach that had caused them all such unhappiness around the time of the d’Arblays’ marriage and had quite warmed to his son-in-law subsequently, no doubt influenced by the charming descriptions of their married life in Fanny’s letters home. Dr Burney had begun to lend d’Arblay books from the ‘Chelsea circulating library’,13 and now looked forward with glee to the prospect of romping with the ‘Bookham Brattikin’. The full return of affection from her beloved father made this period truly happy for Fanny, and was further confirmation, if she needed it, that her own judgement about what was best for herself had been superior to his.
Naturally enough, as the birth approached Fanny became extremely anxious about her chances of survival, and began a farewell letter to her husband which is a touching memorial of their mutual love, praising ‘the chaste, the innocent, the exemplary tenour of your conduct, & the integrity, the disinterestedness, the unaffected nobleness of your principles & sentiments. – Heaven bless you, my d’Arblay! here & hereafter!’14 Such parting words were not, however, necessary; the baby, a son, was born without complications on 18 December 1794, and three weeks later his mother described herself as ‘wonderfully well’.15 Even in this first letter about him, Fanny remarked on ‘a thousand little promises of original intelligence’ in the little bundle at her side. He was christened Alexander Charles Louis Piochard d’Arblay, but was soon known to his parents as ‘the Idol of the World’.16
It is hardly s
urprising that during the autumn and winter when the baby was born, Fanny had barely time or inclination to attend to an important episode in her professional life, the first and only production of one of her plays. It is ironic that though The Witlings had been shelved and none of her later comedies ever reached the stage, one of the strange, half-finished tragedies that she composed at Court was chosen for production. The Court dramas had been circulating among the family and had struck young Charles Burney as saleable (unlike Brief Reflections, all of the profits of which had gone to the priests’ charity). He had contacted the actor John Philip Kemble on his sister’s behalf, knowing how strapped for cash the d’Arblays were, and met with immediate success; Kemble liked Hubert de Vere, but Fanny preferred Edwy and Elgiva, and it was this play which was rushed into production in January 1795 with a cast that included Kemble himself and his sister Mrs Sarah Siddons in the leading roles. Rehearsals were late and patchy and at no point was the author, who had given up her only copy, required or allowed to alter the play. It went on, for its first and only performance on 21 March 1795, in an essentially unactable form.
Fanny came up to town to see the play having been ill for weeks with a painful abscess on the breast which had forced her to wean the baby. Drury Lane Theatre had been magnificently redesigned, and the pantomime playing with Edwy and Elgiva, Alexander the Great (featuring a cast of hundreds and two live elephants), had been composed specially to show off the dimensions of the new stage. No such care had been taken over the main piece, however. At the back of Sheridan’s box, ‘wrapt up in a Bonnet & immense Pelice’,17 Fanny settled down with Susan, d’Arblay and her brother Charles to witness a farcical representation of her already flawed work.
Despite the efforts of Kemble, Siddons and Robert Bensley, who played Dunstan, the rest of the cast seemed hardly to know their lines at all, and the prompter’s voice was ‘heard unremittingly all over the House’, as the reviewer for the Morning Advertiser noticed.18 The actor playing Aldhelm seemed to be making up his speeches as he went along, and the whole cast ‘made blunders I blush to have pass for mine’, as Fanny wrote of the distressing evening to her old friend Mary Ann Port (now Mrs Waddington). Mrs Siddons lost no time in describing the performance to Mrs Piozzi: ‘In truth it needed no discernment to see how it would go, and I was grievd that a woman of so much merit must be so much mortified. The Audience were quite angelic and only laughed where it was impossible to avoid it.’19 Bursts of laughter went up when Edwy cried out ‘Bring in the Bishop!’, which the audience chose to interpret as punch rather than a prelate; they hooted when the King asked what brought Sigibert rushing onto the stage and he answered, ‘Nothing’; and they fell about at the tragic conclusion when a countryman suggested putting the dying heroine behind a hedge. This proved ‘a very accommodating retreat’, as the reviewer of the Morning Herald related:
for, in a few minutes after, the wounded lady is brought from behind it on an elegant couch, and, after dying in the presence of her husband, is carried off and placed once more ‘on the other side of the hedge’. The laughter which this scene occasioned […] was inconceivable.20
This sort of reception would have half-killed Fanny in former years, but it is interesting to see how much more resilient to criticism she had become. Her response was more irritated than ashamed: ‘a more wretched performance […] could not be exhibited in a Barn,’ she told Mary Waddington, echoing the reviewers’ amazement at the sloppiness of the production. She took immediate action to withdraw the piece ‘for alterations’.
The reviews of Edwy and Elgiva, which Fanny read with close attention, also denounced the style of the play as ‘nauseous bombast’, revealing ‘nothing of Poetry, and […] often inelegantly familiar, or ridiculously absurd’.21 Oddly enough, neither this criticism nor the humiliating night at Drury Lane deterred Fanny from hoping that not just Edwy and Elgiva but Hubert de Vere and the fragmentary Elberta might at least be published, if not produced.22 Like Crisp with Virginia, she continued to think them viable works of art.
The summer before the Edwy and Elgiva fiasco, at just about the time when Fanny would have discovered she was pregnant, she had begun to write her new book in earnest, spurred on by the absolute necessity of making money. It was not to be a ‘novel’, a denomination which she felt ‘gives so simply the notion of a mere love story, that I recoil a little from it’, and which, significantly, ‘was long in the way of Cecilia, as I was told, at the Queen’s House’.23 It was to be ‘sketches of Characters & morals, put in action, not a Romance’, and was to contain several ‘sermons’ pointing up the moral in no uncertain terms. Fanny Burney knew her market, and had noted the current popularity of tract-writing – especially the kind so successfully earning a small fortune for Hannah More. But if Fanny thought she could prevent Camilla from turning into a romance simply by inserting a few sermons, she was wrong. Despite her stated intentions, the love-tangles of the central group of young people dominate the book. She was struggling against her instinct to entertain, and the results were predictable: ‘It’s a delightful thing to think of perfection,’ as one of the characters in the novel itself remarks, ‘but it’s vastly more amusing to talk of errors and absurdities.’24
The speed at which the book was written certainly prevented the author from organising her material more coherently, but perhaps the most interesting touches in Camilla might have been lost too had the author, determined on a ‘work’ of moral value, had time to correct it. Fanny finished the book – which is about 350,000 words long – in a period of less than two years that also included the birth of her child and her subsequent illness. She was aware that it sprawled too much and said she was ‘almost ashamed to look at its size’,25 but had really enjoyed its composition (unlike the struggle with Cecilia), reporting to d’Arblay, ‘it is so delicious to stride on, when en verf!’26 This stream of ideas carried along with it matter that had been on her mind for many years, from travel notes dating as far back as her jaunts with the Thrales, to observations on female education, the distresses of unrequited love, the new Young Man, the evils of gambling among women (thinking of the Duchess of Devonshire and her set) and the state of marriage.
Camilla Tyrold is the second daughter of a Hampshire rectory, beautiful, charming, warm-hearted and selfless, whose only faults reside in her youthfulness and inexperience. The favourite of her amiable buffoon uncle, Sir Hugh Tyrold, Camilla is replaced as heiress to his estate by her younger sister Eugenia, towards whom Sir Hugh feels profound remorse, having not only caused her to fall off a seesaw and deform her back and legs (a scene lampooned in Northanger Abbey), but also having exposed her to the smallpox, by which her looks are ruined. Camilla, whose sisterly feelings are as strong as any Burney’s, is not in the least concerned for her own loss of fortune, unlike her beautiful cousin Indiana, Sir Hugh’s ward, who is also disinherited to compensate Eugenia. Money and beauty, and the sudden loss of both, are the powerful forces that work on the group of young people at the heart of the book: the Tyrold sisters, Lavinia, Camilla and Eugenia, their feckless brother Lionel, their handsome, heartless cousins Indiana and Clermont Lynmere, and the old family friend Edgar Mandelbert.
Edgar, described by Joyce Hemlow as ‘the greatest prig in English literature’,27 makes a very unsatisfactory hero. Aged only twenty when most of the novel’s action takes place, his behaviour is of such stuffy rectitude that even the author begins to lose patience with him, allowing the most lively woman character, Mrs Arlbery, to call him ‘a pile of accumulated punctilios’ and ‘that frozen composition of premature wisdom’.28 Edgar is heir to a Norbury-esque estate called Beech Park; he loves Camilla (at a respectful distance) and elects very early on to marry her. However his cynical and misogynistic mentor, Dr Marchmont, persuades the young man to submit Camilla to a ‘probationary interval’ during which, he is convinced, any young woman will prove herself unworthy of his charge. Edgar’s quick submission to this advice is the frail thread on which the subsequent plot depen
ds. Like much in Camilla, it is unlikely, and certainly earned the scorn of whoever wrote in Jane Austen’s copy of the novel, ‘Since this work went to the Press a circumstance of some Importance to the happiness of Camilla has taken place, namely that Dr Marchmont has at last died.’
Most of the action of the novel depicts Camilla’s adventures in society ‘on probation’ and how open to interpretation her actions are to Edgar’s anxious eyes. Just over halfway through the book, the couple reach an ‘understanding’ and become engaged, only to break it off very soon afterwards when Edgar suspects that his fiancée is soliciting the attentions of the fop Sir Sedley Clarendel. The painful restitution of mutual esteem would be moving if Edgar were allowed some normal twenty-year-old characteristics. As it is, he behaves more like a plain-clothes policeman than a lover, following Camilla from resort to resort, ready to have his worst fears about her character proved right.
Fanny Burney Page 34
