Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  A portrait by an unknown artist in a mid-Victorian frame, upon which the name ‘Frances Burney’ and her birth and death dates appear, dates from approximately this period. If authentic, it is the latest image we have of the author. There is much to encourage the identification: facially the subject looks very like Fanny as she appears in Edward Burney’s portraits of 1782 and 1784, and her hair has exactly the same texture, bulk and style. The peculiarities of the subject’s clothes are also suggestive. The hat that covers her lightly powdered or naturally greying hair is of a romantically extravagant ‘cavalier’ design which was never exactly fashionable. The first thing Fanny noted when she landed in England in 1812 was that she was the only woman at the Foleys’ assembly in Deal wearing a hat of any description. She didn’t just cling on to the old habit of wearing hats all the time when away from home, but specifically favoured big hats that would hide her face as much as possible: ‘I beg only a brim, or enlargement, or some thing to shade the Phiz’, she had written to Hetty in 1799, refusing the gift of a new small bonnet. ‘As soon as you, who live in the midst of things, can exclaim, “I would not wear it for the World!” it will just suit me.’11 One is reminded of Fanny’s comic description of herself in 1802 as a ‘Gothic anglaise’, a term which seems particularly applicable to the dress in the portrait, which is in the pre-Revolutionary corseted style but with a scarf tied under the bust as a half-hearted gesture to neo-classical chic. The oddest element in this concoction is the deep pleated frill which has been attached to the neck of the dress. This, too, was never fashionable and actually looks rather absurd, but such an expedient would have been necessary on all Madame d’Arblay’s dresses after 1811. Her old bodices, with their low necklines filled in with translucent fichus, would all have shown her mastectomy scar.

  The ‘wretched health’ that Marianne Francis noticed was the weakness, pain and sensitivity to cold and damp which Fanny suffered as a result of her mastectomy, her survival of which the family rightly regarded with awe. Though she was in fact to outlive almost all of them, Fanny was ‘in a most dangerous state’12 in the autumn of 1812, and was cosseted and indulged by everyone. ‘The avidity of my dear Family in our present union is as yet beyond any controlling’, she wrote to d’Arblay at the end of September. ‘I am never an hour out of the arms of one or another of the affectionate tribe’.13

  Many people wanted to see the returned exile: old friends like Lady Crewe, Sheridan, the ageing Joseph Banks and the writer Anna Barbauld, and others who wished to be introduced for the first time, including the novelist Maria Edgeworth and the poet Samuel Rogers. Thomas Jefferson Hogg met Fanny in 1813 and wanted to introduce her to his friend Shelley. It is hard to imagine that she would have liked the notorious young atheist poet, or he the ageing ‘bundle of conventionalities’, as Hogg described her later. Hogg noted disappointedly that Madame d’Arblay talked ‘wholly about herself’.14

  Fanny was so exhausted by the round of parties that she was soon obliged to keep to her room for one day in two to ‘recruit’, though, typically, she rallied quickly in congenial company. Some invitations were virtually impossible to refuse, such as one from the infamous Princess Caroline of Wales, whose separation from her husband, now Prince Regent, and estrangement from the rest of Fanny’s beloved Royal Family made hers an uncomfortable acquaintance. (The fact that Dr Burney was also included in this particular invitation and wanted to go, contrary to custom, was probably the only reason Fanny accepted.) One of the other guests, Thomas Campbell, left an interesting account of the occasion, noting the glaring differences between the Princess’s gaucherie and the novelist’s composure:

  [Madame d’Arblay’s] manners are highly polished, and delicately courteous – just like Evelina grown old – not bashful, but sensitively anxious to please those about her. I sat next to her, alternately pleased and tormented with the Princess’s naïveté, and Madame D’Arblay’s refinement. [Y]ou would love her for her communicativeness, and fine tact in conversation.15

  What Campbell describes is not just correctness in manners but a true delicacy, developed to a fine art through years of painful self-awareness. His appreciation of her ‘fine tact’ and refinement would have gratified Madame d’Arblay profoundly.

  The ghosts of two old friendships came back to haunt Fanny on this trip to London. Hester Piozzi, widowed for the second time in 1809, had been persuaded by Marianne Francis that Madame d’Arblay wanted a reconciliation, or at least an exchange of civilities, but having called once when Fanny was out, she didn’t try again. Madame de Staël was in town too, but Fanny made no attempt to see her. Her novel Corinne (1807) had made de Staël famous internationally, and her works of criticism had placed her in the mainstream of European romanticism. Fanny had followed her career with great interest and admiration, but felt that it would be hypocritical to renew their old acquaintance, even though de Staël was now ‘received by all mankind’, as Fanny wrote to Mary Ann Waddington, adding sardonically ‘– but that, indeed, she always was – all womankind, I should say’.16

  While staying with her brother Charles at Sandgate, Kent, Fanny was introduced to the philanthropist and social reformer William Wilberforce (a friend of Marianne Francis through her great-uncle Arthur Young), and had ‘4 Hours of the best conversation I have, nearly, ever enjoyed’:

  He was anxious for a full & true account of Paris, & particularly of Religion & Infidelity, & of Buonaparté & the Wars & of all & every Thing that had occurred during my Ten years seclusion in France: & I had so much to communicate, & his drawing out, & comments, & Episodes, were all so judicious, so spirited, so full of information, yet so benignly unassuming, that my shyness all flew away, & I felt to be his confidential Friend, opening to him upon every occurrence, & every sentiment, with the frankness that is usually won by years of intercourse.17

  Wilberforce’s long campaign against the slave trade had resulted in the Abolition Act of 1807, and he was a prominent member of the increasingly influential ‘Clapham Sect’ of Evangelical Christians, to which Marianne Francis also belonged. In the violent age through which they were living, a pious and active humanitarian like Wilberforce inspired Fanny’s deepest respect. Her ten years of obscurity in exile had prevented her from making friends among such people, or playing any part herself in the philanthropic movements of the day which so obviously interested her. She had been ‘forcibly struck’ on her return to England that ‘sacred themes, far from being either neglected, or derided’ (as she felt they were in France) ‘are become almost common topics of common discourse’.18 As she walked along the Sandgate ramparts discussing religion and politics with Wilberforce, under the shadow of the Martello towers which Pitt had ordered to be built against the threat of a French invasion, the intellectual deprivations of her years in France must have come home strongly.

  As it was, all Fanny had to show for her long exile was the incomplete manuscript of The Wanderer, which lay untouched in its portmanteau for some months after her arrival in England. Early in 1813 she suddenly set to work on it again with a vengeance. Uncertain of the length of her stay in England, which was dependent on the progress of the war with France and Alex’s establishment at university, she hurried on with the book in the hope that she could get it through the press. In the spring of 1813, she began to discuss with her brother Charles the possibility of auctioning the rights to this ‘work’ (as with Camilla, she was unwilling to call it a novel), and eventually agreed a sale of the rights to the firm of Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown in Paternoster Row. The deal looked good, but in fact gambled a large amount on The Wanderer going into several editions. Fanny was to receive £500 on delivery of the manuscript and two further payments of £500 in the eighteen months following publication. She would be paid for up to five subsequent editions, but only after each sold out, with a possible maximum income of £3000 if the book was successful.

  Expectations of Madame d’Arblay’s new work were high, as one reviewer later recalled: ‘We can hardly rem
ember an instance when the public expectation was excited in so high a degree, as by the promise of a new novel from the pen of their old favourite, Madame D’Arblay.’19 As early as December 1811 Lord Byron had heard with amazement that a thousand guineas was being asked for the book; by September 1813 most of literary London knew that Longman had ‘paid £3000’ for the rights. Even provincial Miss Austen was joking about The Wanderer in relation to her own newly-published Pride and Prejudice: ‘Poor Dr Isham is obliged to admire P.& P. – & to send me word that he is sure he shall not like Mde Darblay’s new Novel half so well.’20* Madame d’Arblay’s long residence in France led people to expect an autobiographical Zeitroman, perhaps a satire of manners under Napoleonic rule, an Evelina or Cecilia for the Revolutionary period. The book’s title set up certain obvious expectations about its plot which were only just satisfied by the heroine’s meanderings around southern England. Moreover, the title plugged into the overpowering current of romanticism surging through the art and literature of the 1810s. So many writers and artists had used the trope of the solitary ‘wanderer’ in these years (Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel and Wordsworth among them) that it was already in danger of becoming a cliché.

  By the later stages of composition Fanny was obsessively adding ‘MORE & MORE last touches to my work, about which I begin to grow very anxious’.21 No one knew better than she what a hotchpotch it was, two-thirds of it composed at intervals over the previous fifteen years and the last 60,000 words poured out in a rush since her return to England. But money was a serious consideration again, with the costs of Alex’s education facing the impoverished d’Arblays. Alex had been sent to cram towards a Cambridge scholarship in Mathematics at Charles Burney junior’s school in Greenwich, now run by Charles junior’s son, Charles Parr Burney. An English university education still seemed the safest way to avoid conscription for their son in France, but without a scholarship the d’Arblays doubted they could afford it. After a great deal of shameless manoeuvring and string-pulling by his mother (including an appeal to the Queen), Alex was elected to a Tancred Scholarship at Cambridge, worth £120 a year, and went up to Caius College in October 1813.

  Alex’s superior abilities had been so assiduously puffed by his mother before their arrival in England that it is not surprising that he failed to live up to the Burney family’s expectations, nor to the standards later demanded of him at Cambridge. His poor performance at school in Greenwich was put down to the difference between the French and English mathematical systems, but while this clearly contributed to his difficulties, it was by no means the whole story. Charles Parr Burney was unimpressed by his cousin’s French schooling and lamented that the youth was not ‘more careful, – more regular, – more systematick, – more TIDY’. When Alex got to Caius, these shortcomings were shown up immediately. Typically, he followed a period of concentrated work and achievement (in this case, matriculating at Cambridge) with a complete falling-off of interest and effort. Unlike his cousin Clement Francis, who was two years ahead of him at Caius, Alex was not a committed scholar and by the end of his first term was in such trouble with his tutor that he was in serious danger of being sent down. His late arrival at his mother’s lodgings on Lower Sloane Street that Christmas alerted her to trouble: he had been kept back to fulfil various college ‘impositions’ for absence and lateness. Fanny resorted to constant monitoring of her errant son’s work and hired a private tutor (at considerable expense) to keep him at his studies all through the vacation.

  Alex’s difficulties at Cambridge puzzled and distressed his mother, who had always been confident that he would excel. Every academic success of his sent her into raptures about ‘the Honour!’ involved, which she bruited abroad without a grain of modesty or restraint. His failures, which she covered up assiduously, inevitably struck her as personal humiliations. She tried to excuse them on grounds of Alex’s disrupted education, ‘absence of mind’ and (increasingly) frail health, but his really dangerous frailty was, at this age, somewhat harder to identify.

  Alex’s difficulties at the university, old Charles Burney’s failing health and the imminent publication of The Wanderer had kept Fanny in England for more than a year. There were also some troublesome business affairs to sort out. Fanny’s pension from the Queen, which had been paid to Dr Burney’s banker in her absence, had got entangled in her father’s accounts and was, essentially, untouchable. A worse loss financially was Camilla Cottage, which the d’Arblays had been worrying over for years. Dr Burney advised them not to sell it, but to retain the cottage for the rent, however small, and to provide Alex with ‘a little freehold in his Native Country’22 which might be of value in the future. This presupposed that the d’Arblays had a freehold to hang on to or dispose of, but in October 1813 William Locke junior informed them through his solicitor that he was selling Norbury Park (which he had inherited on his father’s death three years before), and that the land upon which Camilla Cottage was built was included in the sale. Locke was offering to buy the cottage for its appraised value, £640.

  The d’Arblays were shocked by the news that the freehold did not in fact belong to them, having misunderstood the nature of their friends’ wedding gift back in 1793. They had spent more than £1000 building the cottage, much more repairing and maintaining it, and had banked on selling the property at a profit. Young Locke’s offer struck them as an insult rather than what it really was, an unnecessarily generous gesture towards two unbusinesslike old family friends.

  The resulting quarrel between the d’Arblays and the Lockes casts an interesting light on Fanny’s character. Monsieur d’Arblay, angered by the apparent injustice of the forced sale, fired off a series of letters which caused deep offence at Norbury Park. Not surprisingly, Fredy Locke defended her son’s position: in law, he was not obliged to buy the cottage from his tenants, nor was any purchaser obliged to compensate the d’Arblays for their overspending on the house and failure to notice that they had never been granted the freehold. Fredy Locke’s letters to Fanny at this time were conciliatory and sympathetic, but her defence of William struck Fanny as a form of betrayal. She wrote back in the role of ‘The Wife who firmly believes that no human being that breathes has a higher sense of honour than her husband’,

  & that even the 3 Ang[e]l friends whom she forever deplores. Mr – Locke – Mrs. Delany – & her Sister –

  No, nor all the angels that now surround them – had not, & have not intentions more pure.23

  This absurd rhetoric, with its crude appeal to Fredy’s feelings towards her dead husband and friends, provoked a restrained criticism from Mrs Locke, who had anticipated an ‘apology, if I may use the word, for an unusual manner, which I cou’d not but feel most painfully’.24 But an apology was exactly what no one could ever extract from Fanny d’Arblay. She had kept a copy of her own letter marked ‘an answer to a most unlooked for Letter of Reproach from my dearest Intimate Friend in her misconceived resentmt of Monsieur d’Arblay’s high & forcible reclamation to Wm. Locke Junr’. Resentment towards Monsieur d’Arblay could only ever, in Fanny’s eyes, be ‘misconceived’, and reproaches undeserved. Her sense of her own rectitude, veracity and moral superiority – and those of her nearest and dearest – was unassailable.

  Meanwhile, Monsieur d’Arblay continued to write plangent letters from his office at the Ministry of the Interior in Paris. The armistice of June 1813 between France and the Allied forces of England, Russia and Prussia lasted only two months, and the renewal of hostilities in August made travel between England and France as difficult and the mail as slow as ever. It took weeks for d’Arblay’s letters to arrive bearing such news as Narbonne’s death on active service at Torgau in Austria and Victor Latour-Maubourg’s near-fatal injuries during the battle of Wachau. Keeping up with the details of the war became an obsession for Fanny, but in her desire to be thorough, she never quite caught up with the very latest information. Her father had kept piles of newspapers and periodicals for her to go through, which she was determined t
o read in order, as Sarah Harriet observed with amusement to Charlotte Barrett:

  [Madame d’Arblay] reads Newspapers from morning till night: but Newspapers of three or four weeks back, & will not let you say a word to her of recent events. ‘O, don’t tell me – I shall come to it – I am reading up to it!’ And by the time she has read up to it, some newer intelligence will probably have arrived, which will make what we are now rejoicing at appear stale, & put it all out of our heads. […] Who can be much interested to hear her talking so big of a partial skirmish, who knows that a momentous general engagement has so recently taken place? – These are oddities that are – that are – rather – odd!25

  ‘At a time like this,’ Fanny wrote to Mrs Locke, ‘all public news, good or bad, of a Warlike nature, fills me with almost equal alarm.’26 In February 1814, with the Allies sweeping towards Paris, the fall of Napoleon seemed imminent. D’Arblay, like many other terrified residents of Paris, was steeling himself for a long siege, but on 30 March the Allies entered the capital and three days later The Times pronounced that ‘Everything announces the winding up of the great Drama.’ On 11 April the amazing news reached London that Bonaparte had abdicated.

  The triumphant fireworks that went off in London that night were clearly visible in Dr Burney’s apartment on the top floor of Chelsea College, and provided a strange counterpoint to the scene inside. On the previous day, Fanny had hurried to the college on hearing the news that her father had taken a turn for the worse, and was distressed to find the old man in a sort of trance and incapable of recognising or responding to her. His last coherent action was to make his way to the window, which overlooked the hospital’s burying ground where his second wife lay, and after a long contemplation of the scene to open his arms wide and say, ‘All this will soon pass away as a dream!’27 While Fanny was taking in the solemnity of this moment, the servants used the opportunity of the Doctor’s arms being suddenly extended to remove his wrapping gown and get him ready for bed. Charles Burney died two days later in his sleep, less than a fortnight before his eighty-eighth birthday.