Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  Fanny refused to the very end to believe that her father was dying, and even when he was dead insisted on being left alone with the corpse in the hope that someone had made a mistake: ‘I forced them to let me stay by him, & his reverend form became stiff before I could persuade myself to believe he was gone hence for-ever.’28 The idea of Madame d’Arblay forcing the doctors, servants and other members of the family to indulge this slightly grotesque final audience could either be interpreted as profoundly pathetic (in the manner of King Lear) or inappropriately egocentric. It was a scene she was to enact almost exactly at her husband’s deathbed and which, many years later, her son took pains to avoid being replayed over his own dying form.

  The Doctor’s will caused trouble among his children because he left large bequests of £1000 or more to Hetty, Fanny, Sarah Harriet and Susan’s daughter Fanny (Phillips) Raper, but only £200 apiece to James, Charles and Charlotte. Hetty and Fanny, as residuary legatees, were heirs to his savings, running to some seven or eight thousand pounds. They also benefited from the sale of the Doctor’s property, including his library, sold later in 1814 for a total of £2353, and had possession of his manuscripts, letters and unpublished memoirs, which were expected to be a continuing source of income. No wonder that Charlotte (whom the Doctor had mistakenly imagined well-off by her two widowhoods) felt hurt and excluded from her father’s good wishes, and that James, the disregarded eldest son, was infuriated and resentful. Certainly James’s treatment seemed like punishment from beyond the grave for having failed to please his father either in his politics or his private life. Fanny and Hetty attempted to placate their brother with offers of money from the old ‘Irish mortgage’, the loan to Molesworth Phillips which was being recovered at last by litigation (perhaps not the most tactful offer, since Phillips was still James’s friend), but he refused to be mollified. The will ‘seems to have cast a kind of general though undefinable cloud over the Family Harmony’, Fanny wrote sadly to Charlotte in June.29

  The Doctor had lived just long enough to see the publication of The Wanderer at the end of March 1814, but probably never read its fulsome dedication to him, an unusually frank statement on the author’s part of her own history as a novelist and her persistent anxieties about the form which she had done so much to develop. Her defence of the novel as ‘a picture of supposed, but natural and probable human existence’ which ‘holds […] in its hands our best affections […] exercises our imaginations […] points out the path of honour; and gives to juvenile credulity knowledge of the world, without ruin, or repentance’ is rather overset by the succeeding denunciation:

  in nothing is the force of denomination more striking than in the term of Novel; a species of writing which, though never mentioned, even by its supporter, but with a look that fears contempt, is not more rigidly excommunicated, from its appellation, in theory, than sought and fostered, from its attractions, in practice.

  So early was I impressed myself with ideas that fastened degradation to this class of composition, that at the age of adolescence, I struggled against the propensity which, even in childhood, even from the moment I could hold a pen, had impelled me into its toils[.]30

  By 1814 few people shared her association of the novel with ‘degradation’, and Burney herself admits in the same piece of writing that she only came to hold novels in low esteem because there were so few of them in her father’s library – from which she deduced that the whole class must be ‘condemned’.

  Her irrationally low opinion of the novel found a rational challenger in her younger admirer, Jane Austen, whose idea of the form’s potential had, ironically, been shaped by works such as Miss Burney’s own. The famous authorial defence of the novel in Chapter Five of Northanger Abbey (not published until after Austen’s death in 1817) states the case clearly, and seems to be a direct retort to Fanny Burney’s anxious remarks in The Wanderer:

  I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding – joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. […] Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much descried.31

  Unlike Austen, Fanny Burney never achieved a sense of belonging to a mutually supportive professional ‘body’ or gave herself up to the dangerous luxury of providing readers with ‘extensive and unaffected pleasure’. Burney obviously knew how to write a bestseller, but seems to have wanted to renounce that knowledge for the purpose of achieving greater literary seriousness, implying in the Dedication to The Wanderer that she aspired to the same ‘grandeur, yet singleness of […] plan’ in her ‘work’ that characterises epic poetry, ‘that sovereign species of the works of fiction’.32 Her reasons for doing so seem inextricably linked with her chronic neuroses about performance and professionalism, issues dealt with at length in The Wanderer; but they were bad reasons, and Austen was right to object to them.

  The Wanderer or Female Difficulties tells the story of a young refugee from France during ‘the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre’ who joins a group of English men and women as their open boat prepares to leave the French coast by stealth one night in 1793. The girl’s appearance is unpromising: she is dressed raggedly and partially covered in bandages and patches. As the light rises, her companions are able to see that her skin is ‘dusky’ like that of a Creole, but she refuses to satisfy anyone’s curiosity about her origins, purpose or even her name, maintaining a silence that some on the boat find infuriating and suspicious and others, like the young anti-heroine of the book, Elinor Joddrel, and her companion Albert Harleigh, consider fascinating and suggestive.

  Through Elinor’s patronage and protection, the stranger is assimilated into the social circle represented in microcosm on the boat. Travelling with Elinor and her aunt Mrs Howel via Dover and London to Lewes in Sussex, the ‘Incognita’ gradually loses her black and shabby appearance (a disguise adopted to effect her escape), emerging as an exceptionally beautiful white woman. Though she maintains her refusal to explain her business in England, she seems to be a gentlewoman of high class and excels in various genteel accomplishments, such as needlework, singing and playing the harp. For a time she is tolerated by her hostess as a curiosity, but eventually Mrs Howel and her friends begin to suspect that ‘Ellis’ – the name they have given her, based on the initials ‘L.S.’ which appear on a letter – is an adventuress, and she is ejected from their society with threats.

  In contrast to the vulgar jealousy and mean spirit of these middle-class women (who are primarily concerned to get rid of Ellis ‘without letting the servants know the indiscretion we have been drawn into, by treating her like one of ourselves’33), the Wanderer finds immediate sympathy with the aristocrats she meets in Brighton, Lady Aurora Granville, Lord Melbury and Albert Harleigh. Harleigh has admired the ‘Fair Unknown’ ever since he saw her playing Lady Townley in an amateur production of Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Husband. Not only did she look beautiful in the role, with her ‘fine form […] and animated complexion’, but was transformed in voice and manner, giving Harleigh a tantalising glimpse of the discrimination, sensibility and intelligence concealed beneath the persona of silent, mysterious ‘Ellis’.

  Harleigh’s increasing admiration for Ellis soon provokes Elinor Joddrel into an intense sexual jealousy. Up to this point, Elinor has not thought of Harleigh as a lover (she was formerly engaged to his younger brother Dennis), but her passion, once acknowledged, be
comes violent and headstrong. Elinor, the frank and outspoken enthusiast of ‘this glorious epoch’ of revolutionary freedom, has no qualms about declaring her feelings to Harleigh, but sadistically does so using Ellis as go-between. She thereby inhibits a similar declaration of love between Harleigh and Ellis, and makes Ellis the vehicle of Harleigh’s pained refusal. Elinor’s response to his rejection is to attempt suicide with a poniard soon after, ‘a smile triumphant though ghastly’ playing about her lips.

  When Elinor runs away and Ellis is forced to support herself alone, the novel enters a long phase of describing the difficulties and dangers faced by an unprotected woman looking for respectable employment. Unlike Cecilia in The Witlings, for whom even the threat of having to work is traumatic, Ellis is totally exposed to the conditions of the market, the humiliation of having to solicit work, the expense of conducting it, the physical and mental exertions of the work itself and the difficulty of getting paid correctly or on time. As Ellis’s first job is as a teacher of the harp, Burney is able to include many observations on the life of a music-teacher obviously derived from her father’s experience (as well as from that of a young woman whose talents and enterprise she had admired in Bath in 1780, ‘a taylor’s daughter, who professes musick, and teaches so as to give six lessons a day to ladies, at five and threepence a lesson’34). The note of genuine grievance in The Wanderer on the hard lot of performers and artists rings true not just for Charles Burney and his family of dancing-masters, actors and painters but for that other kind of performing animal, the writer: ‘The better he performs, the harder he has worked’, kind-hearted Giles Arbe says in defence of the artist; ‘he does not execute what is easiest, and what he likes best, but what is hardest, and has most chance to force your applause. He sings, perhaps, when he may be ready to cry; he plays upon those harps and fiddles, when he is half dying with hunger; and he skips those gavots, and fandangos, when he would rather go to bed!’35

  Ellis’s need to work is only temporary; when her circumstances are revealed (some 300,000 words into the book) and she is restored to the protection of her guardian, the experiences she has undergone as a music-teacher, seamstress, milliner and lady’s companion will be put behind her. But Burney dwells on them at great length for fairly obvious reasons: though the heroine of The Wanderer and her immediate circle are all wealthy or aristocratic, Burney’s real subject (and audience) was that section of English society which Ellis passes through as a ‘wanderer’, the new and vulnerable bourgeoisie, particularly its female members, caught between the old regime of dependence and idleness and the increasing necessity to be self-dependent. Times had changed, and Burney was aware of how inadequate traditional female ‘accomplishments’ were in the new world order, as her heroine states with vigour:

  How few, […] how circumscribed, are the attainments of women! and how much fewer and more circumscribed still, are those which may, in their consequences, be useful as well as ornamental, to the higher, or educated class! those through which, in the reverses of fortune, a FEMALE may reap benefit without abasement! those which, while preserving her from pecuniary distress, will not aggravate the hardships or sorrows of her changed condition, either by immediate humiliation, or by what, eventually, her connexions may consider as disgrace!36

  The economic status of women and the vexed question of their rights are dealt with exhaustively in The Wanderer, making this Burney’s most political novel by far. Though the book is set in 1793, the date of her Brief Reflections, Burney had adjusted her views during the revolutionary period and brought different ideas to bear in her novel – or rather, different ways of opposing the radical feminist view. In Brief Reflections, she had argued the necessity of protecting women from ‘the heart-hardening effects of general worldly commerce’ in order to preserve their moral superiority, but by the time she wrote The Wanderer it had become clear that women could no longer count on such protection. When Admiral Powel says to Ellis that ‘the devil himself never yet put it into a man’s head, nor into the world’s neither, to abandon, or leave, as you call it, desolate, a woman who has kept tight to her own duty’, he is speaking as a representative of the old school and of idealised past manners. His words are undercut not just by his own behaviour but that of the other supposed male ‘protector’ figures in the novel, particularly Ellis’s guardian, the Bishop, for whose safety Ellis is expected to make any sacrifice, like the heroines in Burney’s tragic dramas.

  The decline of the ‘protection’ offered to women had left the idea of separate spheres in tatters, as The Wanderer amply illustrates. The alternative was for women to become self-sufficient, though the trials of Burney’s heroine show how nearly impossible, in practice, that was. The Wanderer is ‘a being […] cast upon herself, a female Robinson Crusoe, […] unaided and unprotected, though in the midst of the world, […] reduced either to sink, through inanition, to nonentity, or to be rescued from famine and death by such resources as she could find, independently, in herself’.37 Ellis’s passivity and sufferance of ill-treatment (which at many points actually provokes ‘difficulties’ rather than solves them) is very much at variance with the power of this authorial statement at the end of the book. Her reward for her many trials is to be married quietly to Harleigh (a man who has been shown to be her moral inferior, as is everyone else in the story) and to be allowed to forget all about self-dependence for ever. Her conventional exit from the world of ‘female difficulties’ is therefore at odds with the implied message that a system which imposes such mental, economic and social restraints on women is a system ripe for change.

  Latter-day readers latch on to this message with relief, though it is unlikely that Burney consciously wanted to be the bearer of it. The self-dependence she advocated was at risk of being confused with the impious self-worship she believed to be at the heart of the new feminism. The arguments of the libertarians are thoroughly represented in The Wanderer by the novel’s strongest female character, Elinor Joddrel, whose rash behaviour, melodramatic egotism and wrong-headed pursuit of Harleigh mark her out as attractive but dangerous. Burney is very much in two minds about Elinor: on the one hand, she is that object of horror for the author, ‘an agreeable infidel’, whose real-life model, the ‘Miss W[—]’ Burney met in Bath back in 1780, had seemed ‘a shocking sight, […] with her romantic, flighty and unguarded turn of mind, what could happen to her that could give surprise?’38 On the other hand, Elinor displays the same spirit of longing after social justice that Susan Phillips and the Lockes had exhibited in the early stages of the French Revolution. Elinor reappears at regular intervals in the novel in scenes of high melodrama, dressed as a ‘foreign man’ at Ellis’s subscription concert (where she again tries to stab herself), embracing her own prepared tomb in a graveyard at night (where she tries to shoot herself), yet her disruptive presence does not sufficiently detract from the plain sense of what she says about the rights of woman: ‘which all your sex, with all its arbitrary assumption of superiority, can never disprove, for they are the Rights of human nature; to which the two sexes equally and undeniably belong’.39

  For the book to be unequivocally moral, Burney had to condemn this lively character and the ‘fatal new systems’ she represents. As in Camilla, where despite the author Eugenia emerges as the true heroine (in the eyes of modern readers, at least), there is a sense of Burney again being somewhat out of control of her material. Elinor argues the rationalist case articulately, but makes no converts to infidelity, while Harleigh’s earnest but intellectually spineless pleadings about the immutability of Truth and his argument for immortality from the persistence of consciousness in sleep effects Elinor’s capitulation almost at once. Like Eugenia’s apparent submission to her father’s rhetoric about ‘deformity’ in Camilla, this rings very false indeed.

  Elinor’s loquaciousness and self-indulgent theatricality set her apart from the other characters in the book as an oddity or aberration. She is a full-blown romantic while they derive from the old comedy of manne
rs so dear to Fanny Burney’s heart. Sir Lyell Sycamore, a wicked baronet, is of the same class and style of seducer as Sir Clement Willoughby in Evelina; Mr Tedman, the businessman, is a vulgarian like Briggs in Cecilia or Mr Watts in A Busy Day; Harleigh is another vapid male paragon like Edgar Mandlebert in Camilla. As before, Burney builds up a huge cast of secondary characters whom the heroine observes in picaresque style, but in The Wanderer there is an important difference. Perhaps Evelina was the only one of Burney’s heroines to display any believable flaws which are remedied in the course of the narrative. ‘The Wanderer’ displays none whatsoever. First known as ‘The Incognita’, then ‘Ellis’, and finally revealed to be ‘Juliet Granville’, unacknowledged daughter of an English Lord (and half-sister to Lady Aurora and Lord Melbury), the heroine changes name, status, form, colour and class with such frequency that her real identity, when discovered, seems of little importance. Her ‘wandering’ through society becomes just that, a vague and aimless exercise. There is little humour in The Wanderer, and little true satire. What replaces the satire is a form of bald social criticism (of the conditions of the rural poor, of the treatment of working girls, of racial and sexual prejudice) which makes the book valuable as a socio-historical text today but which did not satisfy those readers and reviewers in 1814 who had been awaiting another comedy from the pen of Madame d’Arblay.