Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  There is much to be said for all this, though it might deprive the Burney family history of another animating sex-scandal. The Burneys were worldly people and reliable detectors of sexual guilt. One feels that the rehabilitation of Sarah and James at the end of their five-year experiment in cohabitation could only have taken place because the odd couple were understood to be just that: odd, but not wicked. Sarah Harriet had many reasons for wanting to leave home. She had seen little of her father’s legendary charm and much of his curmudgeonliness, especially in the years since 1790 when old age, the war, family disappointments, the conclusion of his life’s work and the death of his wife had changed the Doctor almost beyond recognition. He did not find his youngest child very congenial, and let her know it, treating her on occasion with ‘bitter raillery or Harshness’.74 It is little wonder that this spirited, eccentric woman, who thought of herself as ugly, ‘queer’ and unlikely to marry, responded with a form of passive rebellion, taking care not to be any good at things that might tie her to Chelsea as dogsbody spinster daughter. She couldn’t copy, sew or keep house, and would much rather read to herself than aloud to anyone else. In 1796, very soon after the appearance of Camilla, Sarah Harriet’s first novel, Clarentine, was published. It was reasonably successful (though not taken very seriously within the family), and served to show Sarah Harriet that she didn’t necessarily have to stay under her father’s protection for life. She went on to write four more novels over the next three decades, eking out a life of genteel poverty and proud independence on the proceeds.

  From her letters, one can deduce that Sarah Harriet did not have the necessary guile or patience to keep up a false front on the subject of her relations with James. Her intolerance and free criticism of other people’s sexual misdemeanours also suggests she wasn’t sensitive to it. She was easily dissatisfied, tactless, restless and could be difficult company. None of her later jobs as a governess and lady’s companion lasted very long, and she made a poor co-boarder in her one experiment of that kind. The five-year residence with James, in a series of fairly disreputable lodgings and with little money, probably came to an end because she had had enough of it; unlike when impassioned couples split up, Sarah and James seem to have had no hard feelings about the change, and remained very fond of each other. Her search in life, as she articulated later, was not so much for love, from which she seemed to think her looks debarred her, as for ‘a gentle, rational, & friendly associate’,75 and her letters, especially the later ones, show her sighingly resigned to ‘Old Maidism’.

  But in the autumn and winter of 1798 this was cold comfort to the Burney family, especially to Dr Burney, who fumed at the ingratitude and defiance of the unfilial pair threatening to bring disgrace on them all. Any mention of James or Sarah changed his mood abruptly; he wished not to speak of them again. His daughters kept secret from him their efforts to keep in touch with the runaways (unrewarding though these were, since James himself felt aggrieved about his father’s treatment of him), and the Burney sisters’ correspondence in this period is full of concern for their father, who had been left, after Maria Rishton’s departure from Chelsea College in 1799, with no one to look after him.

  The necessity of finding ‘some female society & care’76 for old Dr Burney suggested a hopeful scheme to Fanny. If Major Phillips could be persuaded to release Susan, she would make the perfect companion for her father at Chelsea. Fanny probably intended this to be presented to Phillips as a temporary expedient; little else seemed likely to make him agree to a separation. Dr Burney, not surprisingly, was delighted with the idea. He had not previously been able to admit that Susan’s marriage was beyond repair, but if her ‘sweet temper, tender heart, sound judgement, exquisite taste, integrity & acquirements’ might be put to good use sweetening his dotage, he was very keen to get her back. If he had acknowledged the misery of Susan’s situation earlier, such an action might have been of some use, but by the spring of 1799 it was already too late.

  Susan had been careful to play down the difficulty of her life at Belcotton, to avoid both alarming her family and risking her husband’s anger. Belcotton was cold, damp and isolated, and Susan and her two children (Norbury was in Dublin with his tutor) were often left there alone while Phillips was out with his friends or pursuing his handsome second cousin and neighbour Jane Brabazon. Phillips was a tyrannical and belligerent man, a heavy drinker and gambler who had no qualms about getting into debt (his huge loan from Dr Burney was never repaid, and he frequently called on James Burney for handouts). Susan had reason to believe that he had interfered with her letters to Norbury in the past and might be monitoring her letters home now; her correspondence with her sisters therefore became circumspect and evasive, making use of conspiracy tactics from the past, such as the use of code names (one of hers was ‘Mrs le Blanc’; Phillips was referred to as ‘the Climate’, or ‘le Temps’) and removable ‘cuttings’ at the edges of the writing paper.*

  Still, Fanny had little idea of how poor her sister’s health had become. Her hopes and ‘violent wishes’77 were centred on getting Susan back to England, which she did not believe was really possible before order had been properly restored in Ireland after the uprising of 1798. The Major put off his wife’s ‘visit’ to Chelsea from season to season, and cold-heartedly exploited the family’s increasing desperation in order to extort money from them for supposed travelling expenses.

  In the autumn of 1799 Fanny heard with mixed delight and dread that Phillips had finally decided to let Susan go because of the state of her health. Though she was sure that Susan would revive as soon as she got back to England, the prospect of her starting a journey at the beginning of winter was so alarming that Fanny offered to go over to Ireland herself to nurse her rather than risk her setting out. D’Arblay went up to town to lodge £50 at Coutts’s bank in Susan’s name towards these expenses; the Lockes also sent money secretly.

  However, Susan’s journey went ahead in early December while she was still very weak; she only got as far as Dublin before she had to retire to bed again for weeks, waiting to regain enough strength to continue. She was by this time desperate to get home, probably because she knew she was dying. She left these fears unspecified in her letters, and Fanny could only interpret the references to ‘something […] which has happened’ as possibly connected with ‘a danger she has never yet apprehended from rebels’.78

  The Phillipses, with their seventeen-year-old daughter Fanny and eight-year-old son William, set out from Ireland at last in terrible weather at the end of December, not sure whether the yacht they had borrowed would put in at Parkgate or Holyhead. Charles Burney junior, who had volunteered to go and meet his sister and bring her home in ‘a proper travelling Chaise’ instead of one of Phillips’s cheapskate contraptions, reached Chester by the mail coach on Boxing Day with his fourteen-year-old son Charles Parr Burney and heard that his sister and her family had sailed on to Parkgate, though when he got there he heard that they had been blown back to Holyhead. Charles set off along the north Wales coast road in the snow, only to find that the boat had gone on to Parkgate after all, and he had to hurry back towards Chester again. When he finally found his sister, in lodgings in Parkgate on 2 January 1800, she was not surprisingly much the worse for the long, cold sea-voyage. Charles’s first impression was that Susan, emaciated, coughing violently and suffering from dysentery, ‘could not live two days’.79

  Susan must have rallied enough by the following day for Charles to have justified his rather extraordinary decision to take Phillips and the children to Liverpool for the weekend, leaving his sister at Parkgate to gain some strength in peace. When they got back on the night of Sunday, 5 January, Susan’s forty-fifth birthday, she seemed ‘apparently better’,80 but she spent the night in great pain and was so ill the next morning that she didn’t recognise or attempt to speak to her brother, and died a few hours later.

  Meanwhile, preparations had been going ahead at Chelsea to receive the travellers, and at West Humble
Fanny was waiting impatiently for news from her father and looking forward with anxious excitement to ‘embracing my dearest Susan in your arms & under your roof’, not knowing her sister was already dead. The letters from Parkgate arrived on the ninth; Charles had written to his father, Phillips to the Lockes, asking them to ‘communicate this intelligence to Mrs D’Arblay’. The Chevalier heard the news first; he had called at Norbury Park that morning on his way to London, and had to turn back.

  ’Tis wonderful to me my dearest Fredy that the first shock did not join [our souls] immediately by the flight of mine,’ Fanny wrote soon afterwards to Mrs Locke, ‘but that over – that dreadful – harrowing – never to be forgotten moment of horrour that made me wish to be mad – over – the ties that after that first endearing period have shared with her my Heart come to my aid.’81 The d’Arblays set off from Surrey immediately, hoping to reach Parkgate in time to see the body and attend the burial, but the roads were snowy and the mails from London to Chester all booked up until the twelfth. They were forced to retreat to Chelsea, where they heard later that the funeral had taken place while they were kicking their heels there on the tenth. Charles had been the only mourner.

  So the new century began for Fanny in seemingly irreparable heartbreak. As an old woman, annotating letters she intended to pass on to her heirs, she marked the little note she had sent her father on 9 January 1800 in anticipation of meeting Susan again, ‘These were the last written lines of the last period – unsuspected as such! – of my perfect Happiness on Earth.’82

  * * *

  * His parents and elder brother were all dead long before the Revolution, and his only sister had died in 1792 or 1793, a fact he probably didn’t yet know.5

  * Fanny uses exactly the same words in the Memoirs to describe the Burneys’ beloved old friend Dolly Young’s appearance.

  * The passage has been wishfully interpreted as an allegory of the heroine’s ‘inability throughout the novel to speak or write clearly’, and of female creative problems in general by the critic Julia Epstein,35 the title of whose study of Fanny Burney, The Iron Pen, derives from it. A pen of iron, it might be necessary to point out here, was an engraver’s tool.

  * Some of these melancholy documents, slips of paper typically about an inch and a half deep and filled with minute writing, are preserved in the Berg Collection.

  12

  Winds and Waves

  Fanny was numbed by the shock of her sister’s death. For the first few days she could not cry at all, only scream to give ‘some vent to the weighty oppression upon my soul’.1 The blow was ‘deadly – irreparable – it strikes at the root of happiness’; ‘[I] still sometimes think it is not – & that she will come – & I paint her by my side – by my Father’s’, she wrote miserably to Fredy Locke from Chelsea.2 Dr Burney had to hide in his room for more than twelve hours after the d’Arblays reached Chelsea, literally unable to face them. When he eventually appeared at the parlour door, he wore ‘a look of unutterable anguish’. His eyes were shut and he was muttering, ‘I dread to see you, Fanny! I dread to see you!’3

  There was nothing sublime or transcendent about Susan’s death to mitigate the tragic waste, and the idea of ‘merciful release’ was little comfort, as the family had all been convinced of her imminent recovery. Though piety dictated that it had been the will of God, Fanny couldn’t accept the death ‘chearfully, nor […] regard it otherwise than as a Chastisement!’4 Dr Burney was so overcome that he couldn’t go into public for three months. His only consolation was that Phillips had agreed to let his son William go to Charles Burney’s school in Greenwich, and Fanny Phillips was coming to live at Chelsea College. Fanny hoped to ‘mentally adopt’ her beautiful young niece; Dr Burney, who said ‘he will never part with her’,5 was intent on some compensatory spoiling, the results of which caused a deal of trouble later.

  Once back in West Humble, Fanny also shut herself indoors until d’Arblay took matters into his own hands and engineered a meeting with the Lockes in order to break the ‘hard spell which seemed to obstruct returning consolation’.6 The results were cathartic: ‘overpowered’ by the sight of William Locke, Fanny sank to her knees – ‘I was compelled to let my sorrow – my gratitude – & my anguish take their own way.’7 This must have been an intimidating sight. As Mrs Sheeles had noted all those years before at the death of her mother, Fanny grieved unlike anyone else.

  Fanny felt unhinged by the force of her misery, to the extent that her faculties were impaired. ‘I have lost my power of retaining & retailing’, she wrote to Hetty in late March, ‘& my recollections & ideas all run – I know not how – incoherently against one another’.8 More significantly for her lifelong habit of journalising and letter-writing, she had lost her closest confidante and earliest reader. The ‘power of retaining & retailing’ gradually came back to her, but the motivation to practise it had for the most part gone.

  Meanwhile, the production of Fanny’s comedy Love and Fashion was going ahead at Covent Garden. She had sent a copy of the play to her brother Charles in the spring of 1799, and heard in October that Thomas Harris wanted to put it on the following March. Harris expressed surprise that Madame d’Arblay hadn’t tried her hand at comedy before (clearly he knew nothing of The Witlings), as she had ‘a genius for it!’,9 and praised Hilaria as ‘the first female character on the English stage: – quite drawn from nature’.10 More to the point, he was offering £400 for the manuscript.

  Fanny left the matter in Charles’s hands, and did not expect to have anything more to do with the production. She told Harris that she wanted the play to remain anonymous, but while the d’Arblays were still in London after Susan’s death, staying at Esther’s house in Beaumont Street,* a notice appeared in the Morning Chronicle stating that ‘Madame d’Arblay, ci-devant Miss Burney, has a Comedy forthcoming at Covent-Garden’.11 The leak was galling, not least because Fanny didn’t want the failure of Edwy and Elgiva to spoil her chances of a fresh start as a playwright. Worse than that, the article sent Dr Burney into a panic. He demanded not only that Fanny withdraw the play, but also that the newspaper print a ‘contradicting paragraph’.12 The Doctor’s extreme response is only partly explicable by a desire not to expose the family name to any sort of publicity during their mourning for Susan. Was this the first he’d heard of Fanny’s comedy? If so, she must have deliberately hidden it from him.

  This seems very likely in the light of the letter Fanny wrote to her father following his outburst against any play being produced. She had moved swiftly to retrieve the manuscript from Harris, but clearly intended only to postpone rather than cancel the play’s appearance on the stage (Harris himself expected to use it the following season). Fanny knew the reasons underlying her father’s ‘most afflicting displeasure’, and had anticipated such a response. Since in her letter – the most assertive she ever wrote to her father – she doesn’t once mention Susan’s death it is clear that, in her opinion at least, family delicacy was not the point at issue. The issue was Dr Burney’s chronic lack of confidence in her abilities and judgement, and she had had enough of it:

  Your goodness, your kindness, your regard for my fame, I know have caused both your trepidation, which doomed me to certain failure; & your displeasure that I ran, what you thought, a wanton risk. But it is not wanton, my dearest Father. My imagination is not at my own controll, or I would always have continued in the walk you approuved. The combinations for another long work did not occur to me. Incidents & effects for a Dramma did. I thought the field more than open – inviting to me. The chance held out golden dreams. The risk could be only our own for – permit me to say, appear when it will, you will find nothing in the principles, the moral or the language that will make you blush for me. A failure, upon these points only, can bring DISGRACE – upon mere control or want of dramatic powers, it can only cause disappointment.13

  She pointed out, in a way guaranteed to flatter and cajole, that she had followed her father’s example by wanting to be an a
uthor in the first place, and then by ‘ranging’ from one kind of writing to another. It was not her career only, but ‘our career’ – both the credit and the blame could be shared. ‘Come on then, poor Fan’, she wrote to him, articulating his ideal response, ‘The World has acknowledged you my offspring – & I will disencourage you no more. Leap the pales of your paddock – let us pursue our career.’14

  In truth, Fanny could no longer afford to be ‘disencouraged’ from writing and needed to leap into whatever ‘paddock’ promised some decent grazing. The loss of income from Love and Fashion was serious for the d’Arblays, and had important repercussions. With the overthrow of the Directory in November 1799 and Napoleon’s establishment as First Consul soon after, change was afoot once more in France. Though d’Arblay had resolved years before not to return home while France was still at war with England, nor to serve against his wife’s country, he was more impatient than ever to make a proper contribution to supporting his family. When he heard, late in 1800, that he had been removed from the proscribed list of émigrés in April and that there was a chance to salvage about £1000 from his French property, he was delighted and set out immediately for Holland to make out a procuration (Holland was the nearest country at peace with France from which he could do so). Unknown to d’Arblay, he was already too late to claim his property, but he returned to Camilla Cottage full of high hopes.