Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  There was no need. He died a year later.

  FN

  Robert Bage

  MRT

  Hermsprong; or, Man as he is not

  Biog

  ODNB (Gary Kelly)

  11. Olaudah Equiano 1745–1797

  I believe it is difficult for those who publish their own memoirs to escape the imputation of vanity … it is also their misfortune, that what is uncommon is rarely, if ever, believed. Equiano

  Equiano, later known as Gustavus Vassa, was born around 1745 in what is now the Igbo (‘Essaka’, as he calls it) region of Nigeria. It was then a part of the Abyssinian Empire. Equiano’s father was, he records, a village elder. He was also a slave-owner but, his son hastens to add, a very humane slave-owner. By his own account, Equiano was brought up in a condition of rural simplicity, with numerous siblings. The environment was Edenic: a world away from the invasions, wars and revolutions which were upheaving Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and North America during the second half of the eighteenth century. Equiano’s childhood environment was a place, as he describes (in his stilted high Augustan prose):

  where nature is prodigal of her favours, our wants are few and easily supplied; of course we have few manufactures. They consist for the most part of calicoes, earthern ware, ornaments, and instruments of war and husbandry. But these make no part of our commerce, the principal articles of which, as I have observed, are provisions. In such a state money is of little use.

  He stresses the village’s high standards of virtue, cleanliness, abstemiousness and moral decency, contradicting the image of savagery that one finds, for example, in Robinson Crusoe. There is nothing in Equiano’s account of his Igbo/Essaka upbringing to contradict the slogan on the abolitionist medal: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Equiano’s account in fact makes the Igbo even nobler than the whites who presume to ask that question.

  Aged around eleven years, Equiano lost his African paradise. He was kidnapped while playing innocently with his sister, and carried off to slavery. Initially, like his father’s slaves, his masters were African, but then he was sold on to the traders at the coast. Here he first came into contact with white people. It inspires one of the more vivid sections in the narrative. They strike him as monsters, as he is thrown into the cargo vessel which will carry him away to the New World. These pale devils, with their ‘red faces and loose hair’ must be cannibals, he assumes: they will eat him. He faints with shock, horror, fear and despair – and, as he disgustedly recalls, the stench (‘the salutation to my nostrils’).

  The description of the middle passage is the most affecting, and horrifying (and the most ‘interesting’) in Equiano’s later published Interesting Narrative. His later career, vivid as it is on the page, can be briefly summarised. Sold on a number of times, he was transported to Barbados, where he was judged too physically slight for field labour in the sugar plantations. He eventually found himself in the colony of Virginia, where he was bought by a Royal Navy officer, renamed Gustavus Vassa, and – as a personal valet – humanely treated.

  Equiano endeared himself by loyal service both to his master and, as a sailor on board ship, to the Crown – in acknowledgement of which, in England, he was, while still a teenager, sent to school to learn how to read and write. Equiano also became a devout Christian, persuading his master to let him be baptised, in 1759 – so that he might go to heaven with the white folk. He might be free up there, but not, for a few years yet, down here. Poor ‘Gustavus’ was sold on again. He was now a valuable property – a literate, numerate, well-spoken slave. As such he was eventually bought by a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia and put to work as an inventory clerk, on a tiny salary. Equiano eventually saved up the £40 required to buy his freedom.

  After manumission, he prudently took up residence in England and went into trade himself for a few years (including ‘black gold’, or slaves) before allying himself with the British abolitionist movement, whose figurehead he became. He gave heart-rending speeches, preached, and married an Englishwoman. In 1789, with the help of noble patrons, he published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. The last phase of Equiano’s life was, evidently, happy, but is largely unrecorded. There were two daughters from his marriage; his wife died in 1796 and he followed her a year later, aged (probably) fifty-two. It is not known where he was buried – although he left a sizeable amount to his daughters.

  Equiano’s interesting narrative was widely circulated in the abolition movement, as eyewitness evidence of the realities of slavery. It was everywhere taken to be autobiography: gospel truth. Equiano was ‘the black Ben Franklin’. And so it was accepted for centuries. But a few years ago, scholars – notably Vincent Carretta – found convincing evidence (specifically a baptismal certificate and a ship’s muster roll) that Equiano had been born in South Carolina. He was American.

  This, if true (and it seems, currently, incontrovertible), means that the most vivid African and slave ship sections of the book – its heart – must be invention, fictional. It does not mean, of course, that the narrative is any less interesting, any more than Lord Jim’s experiences in the Indian Ocean are less interesting than Joseph Conrad’s in the same waters. But it does mean that what we have is not a memoir but a novel. One can compromise, and label it the first docunovel in English literature – or (given the South Carolina birthplace), American literature.

  FN

  Olaudah Equiano (renamed Gustavus Vassa)

  MRT

  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

  Biog

  V. Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005)

  12. Fanny Burney 1752–1840

  ‘And what are you reading, Miss—?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.’ Jane Austen’s defence of her craft, via Fanny Burney, in Northanger Abbey

  Frances (Fanny) Burney was born in King’s Lynn, the third of six children of the parish organist. Of humble Scottish extraction, her father dropped the shameful prefix to his birth name, MacBurney. Her mother had French blood, and could claim slightly higher breeding, if, with it, a taint of Catholic incense. Fanny’s father, Charles, was – as his later career proved – much more than a provincial instrumentalist. He could claim at the time of his death to be the country’s major musicologist (although the term would have struck him as barbarous). His career was crowned with the award of an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1769.

  Her father was by far the most important figure in his daughter’s long life. Her first published novel, Evelina, opens with a filial ode of devotion to ‘Dr Burney’:

  Oh Author of my being! – far more dear

  To me than light, than nourishment, or rest,

  Hygeia’s blessings, Rapture’s burning tear,

  Or the life blood that mantles in my breast!

  In the decades after her popularity as a novelist had passed, she dedicated herself to her father’s biography. Memoirs of Dr Burney was released to a world that had forgotten both of them in 1832. To him, to herself, and to her contemporaries (including, even Dr Johnson) she was ‘Fanny’ (‘Fannikin’ to close family friends). Under protest from feminist critics ‘Frances’ is nowadays preferred. She joins Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Arnold Ward as one of the posthumously rechristened.

  In 1760 the family moved to Soho, London, the bustling artistic heart of London where Burney made his way as a music teacher. His skill, learning and ingratiating manner made him welcome in drawing rooms as a guest and performer. There was never much money, but – given the age’s Hanoverian passion for Hausmu
sik – his genius fostered an unusual social mobility. The Burneys’ rise in the world is marked by progressively more fashionable London addresses. A summit in the family fortunes was reached with membership of Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale’s circle, in the Great Cham’s last years. Burney’s ‘Streatham Journal’ (1779–83), containing what Virginia Woolf calls her ‘gnat-eyed’ observations of the Thrale household, offers a snapshot of Johnson’s domestic character – much less ‘Johnsonian’ than the Boswellian portraiture. He had a particular tenderness for his little ‘Evelina’, as he was pleased, jokingly, to call her.

  Exhausted by child-bearing, Frances’s mother had died in 1762. The sisters in the family were largely self-educated and after the loss of their mother they were drawn into a close-knit nucleus, exchanging letters, sharing journals, keeping diaries. We know more about Burney’s milieu than about any other writer of the period. Frances began ‘scribbling’ for her own and her sisters’ entertainment very early. She did not inherit (as did her sisters Hetty and Susanna) her father’s musical ability and was slightly the less favoured for it. They were sent to Paris to be finished and her brother went to Cambridge, while she was kept at home. But by way of compensation there was plenty of raw material for a future novelist. As Burney’s biographer Kate Chisholm notes: ‘The novels that Fanny was later to write are sometimes accused of being too full of dramatic incident to be credible, but within the family there were three elopements, innumerable affairs, disappearing children, and a possibly incestuous relationship.’ Her brother Charles was one of the most successful bibliophile-kleptomaniacs in English literary history (his memorial is the magnificent Burney collection of early newspapers, now in the British Library) and he advised her on literary matters.

  On her father’s remarrying, in 1767, a woman whom the girls considered unsuitably crass (the widow of a prosperous King’s Lynn wine merchant) Fanny burned her already sizeable oeuvre in a ‘grand firework of destruction’. At the same time she began keeping a journal which survives as one of her most interesting compositions. It opens with an apostrophe to ‘Miss Nobody’, in which she promises to record ‘my every thought’. One thinks more than one writes and Burney’s private memorials, some twenty printed volumes, massively outweigh her four novels (long as they are) and eight surviving plays. Only one of the latter was ever performed, Edwy and Elgiva, and it closed after one night. Her most interesting drama, The Witlings, a satire on bluestockings, was suppressed by order of her father and her other ‘daddy’, the man of letters and friend of the family, Samuel Crisp.

  Fanny’s sisters married and mis-married at the appropriate young age; Frances did not. In Jane Austen’s cruelly complected universe, an unmarried maiden’s ‘bloom’ is passed by the age of twenty-five (Anne Elliot is on the very brink of fading). Bloomless she might be but by her mid-twenties Fanny Burney was flourishing as a writer. In 1778, aged twenty-six, she published her first voluminous novel, Evelina. Epistolary in form and sub-Richardsonian in tone, it was subtitled ‘A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World’ – that ‘world’ being the monde, not the Hogarthian street scenes she must have seen from her Soho windows as a child.

  Despite the poem at its head, Evelina was published without her father’s knowledge or permission. The author’s own susceptibility as a ‘Young Lady’ in a man’s world is confirmed by her parting with the manuscript of what would be her most popular work for a measly £20. Evelina made a fortune for everyone but her creator. The novel opens with a fighting Preface, in which Burney masquerades as a male author, defending ‘the humble Novelist’. Like all her fiction, Evelina is a courtship novel which assumes, as its starting point, that women have just one area of freedom in their lives – the right to decide, by acceptance or rejection, who they will marry.

  The success of her first novel inspired a successor, Cecilia: Or the Memoirs of an Heiress (1782). The plot pivots on the plight of an orphaned heiress whose marriage chances are complicated by the requirement that her husband, whoever he may be, must sacrifice his manly privileges by taking on her surname. Although no heiress by this time Frances had herself turned down at least one offer of marriage. Her wilful spinsterdom was becoming something of an embarrassment. In 1786 family connections acquired for her a position at the royal court as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte (wife to the mad George III). She loathed the work and wilted in it. She contrived to retire, on health grounds, in 1791, with a lifelong £100 pension.

  Burney saw her literary future, at this point, as a dramatist. Her guardians disapproved of women being associated with the delinquencies of Drury Lane and it was a generally unsettled period of her life. It was not made any more settled when, at the age of forty-one, in 1793, she married irregularly, after a secret courtship. Her husband was a penniless French aristocrat, Alexandre d’Arblay, a ‘constitutionalist’ – a radical conservative in a complicated relationship with the Revolution but ultimately obliged to flee for his life. The marriage was serially solemnised by both Protestant and Catholic ritual. Neither ceremony had the Burney family’s approval. One child, Alexander, was born in 1794. D’Arblay, an artillery officer, was unable to pursue his profession in England (an Aliens Act was passed in January 1794, prohibiting refugees like him from joining the British army), so Frances buckled to with another novel, with which to make a home for them.

  She began serious work on her grand ouvrage in August 1794, while still the newest of mothers. The book which emerged was Camilla, or A Picture of Youth, published in 1796. Burney was resolved that this time she would not be cheated by publishers and Camilla went on to be the occasion of the most successful literary marketing operation in fiction of the decade. At a period when the routine payment to author for a circulating library romance could be as low as £10, Burney would make from this one work the fabulous sum of £2,000. It helped that it was dedicated, by royal permission, to Queen Charlotte. That was not the only big name helping the novel on its way. Together with her husband, Fanny set up a public ‘subscription’ for the new work. Jane Austen and Edmund Burke were listed among the signatories. Her brother, the light-fingered Charles, sold the copyright (women and Frenchmen had no legal standing) after tendering for bids in March 1796 to a syndicate of publishers, headed by Thomas Payne and Cadell and Davies. They paid an upfront £1,000.

  The five-volume, duodecimo sets were marketed (principally for circulating libraries) at a guinea apiece. After only three months, Burney reported to a friend that ‘The sale has been one of the most rapid ever known for a Guinea book … Of the First edition containing the immense quantity of 4000, 500 only remain.’ She built a home, Camilla Cottage, on the earnings. A fictionalised biography of the Burney family, Camilla chronicles the group story of the Tyrolds, covering twenty years during which the children grow to moral maturity, exhibiting their latent qualities and the effect of the moral instruction of their excellent parent, the Revd Augustus Tyrold. The family resides in Hampshire and there is a charming opening section in which the Tyrolds are taken up by their eccentric and wealthy uncle, Sir Hugh. Playing high-spirited games with little Eugenia Tyrold, this gentleman accidentally lames his niece for life. In an agony of remorse, Sir Hugh makes Eugenia his principal heiress, thus blighting Camilla’s marriage prospects. The plot gets very complicated thereafter.

  So did life get complicated. With Napoleon’s accession, the d’Arblays returned to France, but the family were then stranded on the outbreak of war with England. In September 1811, still stranded in Paris, Frances, aged fifty-nine, underwent a mastectomy without anaesthetic. She recorded the operation in a letter to her sister Esther. It has become (thanks to circulation on the web) her best-known piece of writing for modern readers and has a violent accuracy found nowhere in her fiction.

  I then felt the Knife tackling against the breast bone – scraping it! – This performed, while I yet remained in utterly speechless torture, I heard the Voice of Mr Larry, – (all others guarded a dead silence) in a tone nearly tragic,
desire everyone present to pronounce if anything more remained to be done; The general voice was Yes, – but the finger of Mr Dubois – which I literally felt elevated over the wound, though I saw nothing, & though he touched nothing, so indescribably sensitive was the spot – pointed to some further requisition – & again began the scraping! – and, after this, Dr Moreau thought he discerned a peccant attom – and still, & still, M. Dubois demanded attom after attom.

  The d’Arblays finally managed to return to England in 1812. The next few years were a time of upheaval with the never-ending war, and the constant fear that their son Alexander would be conscripted into it – on which side was not entirely clear. Prudently he was shuttled into the Anglican Church.

  Burney’s career as a novelist effectively ended with the all too aptly entitled The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties in 1814. The taste was now for the national tales of Scott, Edgeworth and Maturin. Her last years were passed in Bath in retirement, supported by a queen who was long dead. Her last serious publication was the life of her father, who had died in 1814. Her husband died in 1818 and their son (now a clergyman) predeceased her, from influenza, in 1837. She, now a forgotten and lonely author, lived on until her eighty-eighth year, her old age a testament to the skilled surgeons of Paris.

  FN

  Frances Burney (‘Fanny’; later d’Arblay)

  MRT

  Camilla, or A Picture of Youth

  Biog