Fanny Burney

British writer

• Born: June 13, 1752
• Birthplace: King's Lynn, Norfolk, England
• Died: January 6, 1840
• Place of death: London, England

Burney, one of the most significant writers of her time, wrote Evelina: Or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, admired as a first comedy of manners. Her diaries and letters remain fascinating records of the lives of the monied classes and the British aristocracy in the late eighteenth century.

Early Life

Fanny Burney was born the third child of Esther Sleepe Burney and Charles Burney, a well-known musician and scholar. Frances, best known as Fanny, soon had two younger sisters and a younger brother. When she was eight, Fanny recalled being teased by her older brother James for not knowing her letters, but two years later she was spending her free time either reading or writing.

In 1760, the family moved from King’s Lynn to London, where father Charles drew his students from the highest levels of society and became acquainted with men such as lexicographer Samuel Johnson and the actor-playwright David Garrick. However, on September 29, 1762, Esther Burney died of consumption, and Fanny and her siblings were devastated. However, the bereft family found some consolation in the kindness of friends, including Samuel Crisp, who would often invite them to his home at Chessington in Surrey. Crisp was partial to Fanny, though her own father had always considered her his least promising child. Perhaps that was the reason Charles left Fanny behind in 1764, when he took his daughters Esther and Susan to be educated in Paris.

Meanwhile, Charles had been courting Elizabeth Allen, a wealthy widow from King’s Lynn. They were married in October, 1767. The Burney children got along well with the young Allens but found their stepmother to be moody and difficult. In 1770, Elizabeth and Charles finally united their households, eventually settling down in a house near Leicester Square and just a few steps from the home of painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. Charles now had a doctorate in music from Oxford and, as Dr. Burney, was introduced to the wealthy Henry Thrale and his wife Hester. This association led to Fanny’s friendship with Hester Thrale and with the Thrales’ frequent guest, Samuel Johnson.

Life’s Work

On her fifteenth birthday, Fanny Burney was ordered either by her father or by her future stepmother to burn everything she had written. It was probably at that time that Fanny’s first novel, which she titled “The History of Caroline Evelyn,” was lost and therefore never published. However, this attempt to diminish Fanny’s obsession with writing failed miserably. She immediately began recording her observations in a diary, and after the move to London, she had ample material. The success of the travel book her father had published in 1771 brought the most prominent members of London society to his home for evening musical entertainments. Fanny’s shyness served her well, however, as she observed without being observed, then re-created the social scene and sent her narratives to be read and admired by Samuel Crisp, or “Daddy,” as she called him.

Fanny now began spending long hours doing secretarial work for her father, who published a second travel book in 1773 and then embarked upon a multivolume history of music. However, Fanny was determined to write, even if she had to stay up all night to do so. Working at first from fragments of a projected sequel to the unpublished “History of Caroline Evelyn,” Fanny secretly developed her novel Evelina: Or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. Only Crisp, her siblings, and a male cousin knew that she was writing this novel, and she even altered her handwriting when making a fair copy of the work. She had her brother Charles disguise himself before taking the manuscript to the bookseller, Thomas Lowndes. Evelina was published anonymously in January, 1778, and was an immediate success. It was several months before Dr. Burney, his friends, and finally the rest of London society learned that Fanny Burney was the author. She immediately became a celebrity, sought after by people in the highest ranks of society and welcomed into such important intellectual circles as the Bluestockings and Dr. Johnson’s Literary Club.

Fanny then turned to writing for the theater. In 1779, she completed a satirical comedy called “The Witlings,” but Crisp and Fanny’s father feared it might offend someone important, so they dissuaded her from having it performed. Fanny’s second novel, Cecilia: Or, Memoirs of An Heiress (1782), was an even greater success than her first. Her writing career was soon interrupted by what was meant as an honor, an appointment as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, but to Fanny, the role was drudgery. After five years, she was permitted to retire.

In January, 1793, while visiting friends in Surrey, Fanny met a group of French émigrés. Among them was Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard d’Arblay, a handsome but penniless aristocrat and a Roman Catholic. On July 28, 1793, at the age of forty-one and despite her father’s objections, Fanny Burney became Madame d’Arblay. The next year, she gave birth to a son, Alexander. The marriage was a happy one, but the couple desperately needed money. In 1795, Fanny wrote another play, Edwy and Elgiva, but it was dropped after one performance that same year. None of Fanny’s other plays ever reached the stage during her lifetime. Her third novel, Camilla: Or, A Picture of Youth (1796), proved to be her most profitable venture. With its proceeds, the d’Arblays built a house in Surrey, christening it Camilla Cottage.

In 1802, hostilities that continued the Napoleonic era in Europe trapped the three d’Arblays in France, where they remained for a decade. In 1811, Fanny was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy without anaesthetic. After returning to England, she published one more novel, The Wanderer: Or, Female Difficulties (1814), but it did not sell well. She nursed her father until his death in April, 1814, then rejoined her husband in France.

In October, 1815, after the Battle of Waterloo, the d’Arblays returned permanently to England, settling in Bath. After her husband’s death in 1818, Fanny moved to London and assembled her father’s memoirs, called Memoirs of Dr. Charles Burney (1832). Despite Fanny’s best efforts, her son Alex could not find a purpose for his life, and he died suddenly in 1837, three years before his mother. Fanny died at her home in London on January 6, 1840.

Significance

During her lifetime, Fanny Burney was known primarily as a novelist. However, after her death, when her niece Charlotte Barrett began bringing out her journals in installments, Fanny became known for her insightful descriptions of life in England and France during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

It was not until the early twentieth century, when the English feminist writer Virginia Woolf referred to Fanny as the mother of English fiction, that scholars began to reassess her achievements. They came to realize that Fanny was primarily responsible for creating the novel of manners—in which realistic women characters are shown as they function in social settings—and that her works had influenced the novels of the Irish writer Maria Edgeworth and those of Jane Austen, the author of Pride and Prejudice (1813). Feminist scholars have also drawn attention to a major theme in Fanny’s novels and plays, the struggles of women to survive in a male-dominated society. Finally, the journals have been re-edited and are now studied as illuminating works on women in eighteenth and early nineteenth century English society—and particularly of talented women such as Fanny Burney—within the patriarchal structure of the Georgian family.

Bibliography

Davenport, Hester. Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Burney at the Court of King George III. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2000. Focuses on the years when Burney was with Queen Charlotte, as recorded in Burney’s letters and journals.

Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Doody’s work is considered the major Burney biography. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Harman, Claire. Fanny Burney: A Biography. London: HarperCollins, 2000. A scholarly and entertaining work. Includes bibliographical references, an index, and illustrations.

Justice, George L. “Suppression and Censorship in Late Manuscript Culture: Frances Burney’s Unperformed ’The Witlings.’” In Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550-1880, edited by George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Justice contends that Burney’s experience with “The Witlings” taught Burney that because the submission of manuscripts to a coterie could result in censorship, it was better to entrust one’s work to the public.

Lane, Maggie. Literary Daughters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. In a lengthy chapter on Fanny Burney, the author shows how Charles Burney’s well-meaning interference in his daughter’s career and in her relationships almost always worked to Fanny’s disadvantage. Primary and secondary bibliographies. Illustrated.

Manley, Seon, and Susan Belcher. O, Those Extraordinary Women! Or, The Joys of Literary Lib. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1972. A lively re-creation of Burney’s life and times. Illustrated.

Spencer, Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1986. One section of this book explains how Burney’s fear of being criticized for unbecoming behavior affected her career, and a later section applies that analysis to Evelina.

Thaddeus, Janice Farrar. Frances Burney: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Argues that most biographers focus on just one aspect of Burney’s personality, while in fact she shows varying characteristics, including timidity, confidence, and even explosive emotionality. Includes a genealogical table, bibliographical notes, and an index.