Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  one of them called out aloud ‘Au quatrieme, D’Arblay!’ M. Hue angrily demanded who spoke? upon which 12 hands were held up, & 12 voices ‘Au Quatrieme, d’Arblay! This was so near a mutiny, that M. Hue was going to inflict some severe punishments, when all in a body lifted up their hands, & joined in the Chorus ‘Au quatrieme, d’Arblay! il est trop fort pour nous!’49

  The teacher backed down at such a show of force, and referred the matter to the headmaster, but when the class was told yet again that they only had to work hard to get the same success as ‘petit d’Arblay’, they took matters into their own hands and threatened to beat him up in the playground if he didn’t either volunteer for a transfer or stop swotting. Alex took the latter course and quickly turned himself into ‘the idlest & most wanton Boy of the Class!’50 to appease his persecutors. His parents only found this out just in time to force him back ‘to his good old way’ before the exams. At the school prizegiving Alex carried off six first prizes and was so laden with books and laurel crowns that he made the audience of 1200 people give ‘a burst of approbation such as was given to no one else’ – so his mother said. She and d’Arblay were swollen with pride at their child’s success: d’Arblay was ‘forced to cover his face with his handkerchief from a joy amounting almost to shame’, as Fanny put it, and she – who had previously feared her child ‘might disgrace himself’ – couldn’t see for tears. It was indeed a very poor look-out for Alexander, as Madame d’Arblay herself realised later, singling out ‘those 6 fatal prizes’ as having ‘turned his understanding into presumption, & his application into caprice’.51

  During her forced sojourn in France, Fanny worked sporadically on her fourth novel, The Wanderer. In the dedication to the book she reveals that it had been ‘planned and begun […] before the end of the last century!’,52 put aside, taken to France in 1802 and composed in patches over the next decade. With no chance of publication in the foreseeable future, there was no necessity to finish the book, and perhaps no desire to finish it either. The long, flexible story seems to have acted as a form of entertainment for Fanny as well as an occupation, a substitute for all the letters, conversations and gossip she was missing with her English intimates. Unfortunately The Wanderer suffered from its leisurely, aimless, episodic composition; without the pressure of a deadline that had knocked all her preceding novels into shape, Fanny’s new story merely sprawled.

  Fanny had all but stopped writing a diary or journal, replacing it with memoranda, jottings and lists of visits, correspondence and reading. In the past she had composed her journal from notes made on the day (this had become a habit during the Court years); now she made very few notes and never bothered to elaborate them. ‘Could I write more frequently, or with more security that I write not to the Winds & the Waves, I would characterise the whole set to you, & try to make us yet shake hands in the same party’, she wrote to her father in 1810 of her friends the ‘female worthies’.53 But there didn’t seem any point in even beginning such a task.

  The silence was broken occasionally, most notably when Fanny had to undergo an appalling operation, without anaesthetic, in 1811. Since the abscess which developed in 1794, she had suffered recurrent ‘breast attacks’ – painful inflammation of the right breast – in 1804 and 1806 (and possibly at other times which she forbore to mention). A regimen of fasting and asses’ milk helped her get through these bouts of illness, but the problem did not go away and by 1810 she had a painful lump in her right breast which by the following year was the size of a fist. After much agonised consultation and protracted attempts at a medicinal cure, it was decided to consult a surgeon, whose alarming diagnosis was that ‘a small operation’ might be necessary. Fanny’s delicacy was as much affronted at the thought of the indignities and exposure ahead as of the pain, and there was a further delay while she hoped to cure herself by diet and quiet living. Unfortunately, nothing but bad news reached her during this period, of the deaths of William Locke and Princess Amelia and of King George’s final collapse into illness (leading to the establishment of the Regency in 1810). Her state of mind had always had a direct effect on her health, and at the next consultation, which was with Napoleon’s celebrated army-surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey, the need for an operation was pronounced vital: the growth was cancerous.

  In the medical culture of the day, exposure of a female patient’s body to examination was not insisted on, and it is highly likely, given Fanny’s temperament and her stated ‘dread & repugnance’ of medical intervention ‘from a thousand reasons besides the pain’,54 that Larrey had not actually seen the affected breast until he was just about to cut it off. The consultation and decision-making that went on between the doctors over Madame d’Arblay’s prone body on the day of the operation certainly suggest it was the first opportunity any of them had had to examine the tumour, and even then, they didn’t touch it. It has been suggested in recent years that the fact that the patient, then aged fifty-nine, survived for twenty-nine years after her mastectomy indicates that the lump was benign and that total amputation may not have been necessary.55 The mastectomy was itself of course a life-threatening operation, from the dangers of haemorrhaging and infection (not to mention the trauma of excruciating pain in this pre-anaesthetic age). Without Larrey’s expertise at suturing and his pioneering surgical techniques, perfected on dozens of battlefields in the Napoleonic era, Fanny would very likely not have survived this cure for a possibly benign tumour.

  The events of the day itself – 30 September 1811 – were recorded by the patient in extraordinary detail in an account written between six and nine months later.56 It was addressed to her sister Hetty, but was intended to be circulated among her immediate family in England, and because she had both her husband and son fair-copy it for her – a task which d’Arblay found traumatic – it could be rightly thought of as primarily addressed to them. Step-by-step she re-enacts the ‘never-ending’ wait for the doctors to arrive, the preparation of the bed, bandages, sponges and two old mattresses to soak up the blood, the arrival of the cabriolets ‘one – two – three – four – succeeded rapidly to each other in stopping at the door’, then the sudden entrance of the seven doctors, all dressed in black, the weeping nurses, the doctor’s imperious commands to his assistants ‘en militaire’ and the horrible moment of having to undress in front of them.

  [E]verything convinced me […] that this experiment alone could save me[.] I mounted, therefore, unbidden, the Bed stead – & M. Dubois placed upon me the mattress, & spread a cambric handkerchief upon my face. It was transparent, however, & I saw, through it, that the Bed stead was instantly surrounded by the 7 men & my nurse. I refused to be held; but when, Bright through the cambric, I saw the glitter of polished Steel – I closed my Eyes. I would not trust to convulsive fear the sight of the terrible incision.

  The style is an odd mixture of reportage and melodrama, relating all the facts with forensic accuracy but underpinning them with a symbolic language of intrigue, mystery, sacrifice and assault. The elements of colouring – the sinister ‘7 men in black’ arriving like assailants and surrounding the bed as soon as the victim’s face is covered, the threat of restraint, the glinting steel – might be considered unnecessary in a piece of writing which, the author claimed, was only written in order to correct any false reports her sister Hetty might encounter (from whom she might hear ‘false reports’ on this subject is hard to imagine). In her instructions about how the account of the mastectomy could/should be circulated, Fanny was very concerned not to have her father, Fredy Locke or Miss Cambridge read or know anything of the matter. (This was easily effected, and none of them ever found out what she had endured.) Her real motive in telling all but her most vulnerable friends about this dreadful event was clearly something different – a desire to shock. She goes on:

  a terror that surpasses all description, & the most torturing pain. Yet – when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast – cutting through veins – arteries – flesh – nerves – I needed
no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision – & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still! so excruciating was the agony. When the wound was made, & the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp & forked poinards, that were tearing the edges of the wound – but when again I felt the instrument – describing a curve – cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose & tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left – then, indeed, I thought I must have expired. I attempted no more to open my Eyes, – they felt as if hermettically shut, & so firmly closed, that the Eyelids seemed indented into the Cheeks.

  This blood-curdling description is surely one of the most extraordinary pieces of ‘reminiscence’ ever committed to paper. Like the operation, the account goes on for a long time, and Fanny spares nothing: ‘the Knife rackling against the breast bone – scraping it!’, the mutilated breast so excruciatingly sensitive that she could feel the doctor’s hand poised over it ‘though I saw nothing, & though he touched nothing’. ‘I have two total chasms in my memory of this transaction, that impede my tying together what passed’,57 Fanny notes with slight regret of her lapses into unconsciousness. She wants to share it all, recall everything with a tenacity of attention which reaches to the very edges of consciousness: ‘When all was done, & they lifted me up that I might be put to bed, my strength was so totally annihilated […] my hands & arms […] hung as if I had been lifeless.’

  The question why Fanny Burney decided to write the operation up in retrospect and in such detail is answered in great part – but not completely – by her obsessive need to control other people’s interpretation of her life. Most diarists or self-biographers would have drawn the line, though, at such a subject. First, there are the artistic difficulties: how do you convey pain convincingly? How can you transcend what is so personal? Of what use is it? Bodily functions and bodily ailments have never made good subjects for art. Fanny made no attempt to record anything about the birth of Alexander, which up to this date was the most traumatic physical event of her life; childbirth has no moral, which is why writermothers have avoided it as an unrewarding subject. There is a moral, of a kind, in Fanny’s mastectomy narrative. It symbolises all the other occasions in her life when she had ‘submitted to the knife’ and bowed to fate or to the will of others. It demonstrates the persistence of her individual consciousness and independent thought even when duty and prudence dictate submissive or passive behaviour. The value of Fanny’s narrative as a rare patient’s-eye view of radical surgery has been acknowledged by medical practitioners and historians of medicine,58 but its greatest value is as a testimony to the inviolability of the ego.

  * * *

  * Charles Rousseau Burney and his family, struggling as hard as ever to make ends meet, had moved there from Titchfield Street in 1798.

  * Burney specifies in the play that it is seventeen years since this incident, interestingly the same interval as that between the composition of The Witlings and the first draft of The Woman-Hater.

  * Rue Basse, now called rue Raynouard, has housed many famous people, including Benjamin Franklin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, in the nineteenth century, Honoré de Balzac. The Maison Balzac, with its rustic garden and views over the river, stands in the plot adjacent to the d’Arblays’ former home.

  * It had been purchased from the state during his exile and could only be bought back at a massively inflated price.

  13

  The Wanderer

  Fanny had made an attempt to leave France for a brief holiday in England in 1810 (probably spurred by her worries about her worsening breast disease), but was prevented from going because of ‘a universal Embargo’ on traffic in the Channel.1 The mastectomy in 1811 and its uncertain aftermath clearly added urgency to her desire to go home, and her next attempt to do so took place in the summer of 1812, as soon as she was sufficiently recovered from the initial trauma of the surgery. Alex was going with her. He was approaching the age of conscription and his mother was keen to get him as far away as possible from Napoleon, who was then preparing to invade Russia. Fanny intended to deposit Alex at university in England, see her family for a few months and return to sit out the rest of the war with her husband in Paris.

  The journey had to be undertaken by stealth, using passports for North American destinations on a ship whose captain was prepared to make an unscheduled (and illegal) call at Dover. When they reached Dunkirk, expecting to set sail almost immediately on the American boat Mary Ann, Madame d’Arblay and her son were kept waiting six weeks while the captain tried to get as many more clandestine passengers for England as he could. Fanny wrote to d’Arblay asking him to send on her manuscript of The Wanderer to relieve her ‘vapid and uninteresting leisure’.2 The novel ‘filled a small portmanteau’ already, and d’Arblay packed it up with as much care ‘as if every page had been a Bank note’, which was of course exactly what the d’Arblays hoped them to become.

  Fanny and Alex left France on 14 August and because of calms in the Channel took two days to reach the English coast. Unknown to the crew and passengers of the Mary Ann, the United States had declared war on Britain in June; the boat was duly seized by the British ship Castilian and brought in to Deal, not Dover as had been secretly planned. In an odd repetition of the confusion surrounding Susan’s return from Ireland, Charles Burney junior was waiting in the wrong port – Dover – and stayed on there three days. Fanny, meanwhile, had delayed writing to her father to tell him of her return until she was back on English soil, for fear of the letter miscarrying. Now she calculated that he would need a few days to prepare for them at Chelsea. She had some old friends in Deal who were happy to entertain her: Lady Lucy Foley, a frequent visitor to the Lockes at Norbury Park, and her husband Admiral Sir Thomas Foley, who was commander of the port. Fanny delighted in the sound of English ‘ringing in my ears’ all through her first dinner at the Foleys’ house. It was there that she saw a plate decorated with a likeness of Lord Nelson’s head and the word ‘Trafalgar’ written underneath and had to ask her hosts what ‘Trafalgar’ meant.3 Nothing could better illustrate the effects of the news blackout in France.

  After a few days, and still ignorant of each other’s whereabouts, Charles junior set off from Dover and the d’Arblays set off from Deal. They met up by accident on a common outside Canterbury when Charles put his head into the carriage and called his sister by name, and travelled on together to Chelsea, ‘Oh! with what reciprocation of Joy!’

  When Fanny reached the Chelsea College on 20 August she was in such a state that she couldn’t recognise the servants or even remember which direction to go: ‘To Chelsea – George comes down – Beckey on stairs – In to Padre – on Sofa – Chairs & Tables removed’.4 The long-awaited moment of ‘ecstatic delight’ at seeing her father, who had moved the furniture to shorten the last few moments of their separation, was much more of a shock than Fanny had anticipated. She hadn’t known of the paralytic stroke suffered by the Doctor in 1806 which had affected one of his hands and depressed his spirits. He was shockingly altered, thin and feeble-voiced, his head ‘completely bent, and hung helplessly upon his breast […] his whole appearance manifesting a species of self-desertion’, as she recalled later.5 In marked contrast to the old days, Dr Burney now preferred solitude to company, never went out if he could help it and took all his meals alone in his room. Fanny struggled to conceal her dismay at her father’s deterioration, not realising that she was actually seeing him at his best. Her nephew Clement Francis, now a student at Cambridge, thought the Doctor was looking twenty years younger because of his daughter’s return from France.6

  The day after arriving at Chelsea, Fanny was reunited with James, Charles, Fanny Phillips (now Mrs Charles Raper) and twice-widowed Charlotte, who was ‘almost overpowered w
ith tender feelings’ at seeing her sister once more.7 The homecoming was marked with long, confidential talks and family parties everywhere but Chelsea College (since the Doctor had lost his appetite for them). James, apparently content to be home with his wife and daughter, had in Fanny’s absence begun to write an acclaimed five-volume General History of Voyages to the South Seas (the most famous volume of which was the fourth, History of the Buccaneers of America), as well as works on civil defence, navigation and whist – a pastime he indulged extravagantly with his friend Charles Lamb and his circle.* Charles Burney junior, appointed chaplain to George III in 1810, had retired from teaching to one of his livings at Deptford and was hoping for promotion to a bishopric. All Fanny’s siblings had aged a great deal during the decade of her exile: Hetty was now sixty-three and Sarah Harriet was a confirmed spinster of forty, the author of three novels, returned from a series of jobs as a governess to live with her father again at Chelsea.

  The nieces and nephews were all adult by this time (except Charlotte’s sickly youngest son, Ralph Broome), and observed their famous aunt and her son with curiosity. Marianne Francis, Charlotte’s intellectual daughter, had already passed on to Mrs Piozzi her sister’s opinion that ‘my aunt d’Arblay is grown fat, & has a foreign accent; i.e., talks like a Frenchwoman speaking remarkable good English.’8 The authoress Mary Berry also thought that Madame d’Arblay had put on weight, but used the old-fashioned term ‘embonpoint’, which she considered ‘very advantageous to her face’.9 Alex, now a tall and silent seventeen-year-old, struck Marianne as ‘a very expressive, dark-eyed, intelligent creature – a perfect bookworm’, and seemed to his cousin Clement ‘a prodigy in mathematics’ who ‘would shine in an English university’.10